This thread is for discussion and articles treating the question of "Can't we all just get along?"

I open with one from the investment newsletter of Richard Russell.

TAC,CD=====================

To my surprise, I received a slew of e-mails over the weekend all centered on whether quarterback Rex Grossman is Jewish or not. Along these lines, I have one interesting story. It concerns the great Jewish boxer, Bennie Leonard, considered by many the best lightweight boxer of all time. Bennie had lightening hands -- he scored 69 KOs out of his 157 fights, which is amazing for a lightweight. In his career during the 20s he was defeated only 11 times. Ring Magazine lists Bennie as number 8 in lists of the 80 best fighters of the last 80 years.

Back in the 40s there were a lot of Irish bars on 8th Avenue in New York. One chain was called the Blarney Stone. The Blarney was famous for having all sorts of free food at the bar, and many times I would drop in to the Blarney Stone for a ten cent beer and a hand full of meat balls. The Blarney was a tough place, and bar fights were commonplace.

At any rate, there's this famous story about Bennie Leonard. One day Bennie stopped in at an Irish bar on 8th Avenue. Bennie was drinking a beer when a fierce-looking Irishman stalked out to the middle of the bar, raised a fist and shouted, "Is there a Jew in the house?" There was a dead silence, and then Bennie walked up to the big guy and said, "Yeah, I'm a Jew." Where upon the big guy extended his hand and said, "I've always wanted to meet you, Mr. Leonard. This is a real pleasure. May I buy you a beer?" And that concludes my racial/religious stories, at least for a while.

In spring 1954, as the Supreme Court was deliberating on Brown v. Board of Education, President Dwight D. Eisenhower invited Chief Justice Earl Warren to a stag dinner at the White House. He seated Warren at the same table as John W. Davis, the lawyer who had argued against school desegregation before the court. Eisenhower proceeded to tell the chief justice what a "great man" Davis was.

As it happened, Eisenhower had authorized his Justice Department to file an amicus brief in the case opposing Davis and public-school segregation. And he specifically allowed his solicitor general, Lee Rankin, to tell the justices during oral argument that "separate but equal" schools were unconstitutional. Yet he sympathized with the segregated South. "These are not bad people," he told Warren at the dinner. "All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big, overgrown Negroes." Warren was appalled.

To put it kindly, Eisenhower was ambivalent on civil rights. "Conservative by nature, he hoped that the advance of the civil rights movement would be gradual, allowing time for the South to change," writes Kasey S. Pipes in "Ike's Final Battle." Most of all, Eisenhower didn't want to lead a civil-rights crusade from the White House. "The only crusade he had ever wanted to lead was liberating Europe in World War II," Mr. Pipes says.But when necessary--or when steps toward desegregation were relatively painless--Eisenhower acted. He broke the color barrier in the military by deploying black soldiers alongside whites to win the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and January 1945. As president, he integrated the schools and movie theaters in Washington, D.C., and federal installations around the country. Most important, he sent U.S. Army troops to Little Rock, Ark., in September 1957 to escort nine black students into Central High School after days of violent protest. It was a defeat from which segregationist forces never recovered.

"Little Rock represented something else as well: the culmination of Eisenhower's own attitude toward racial justice," Mr. Pipes writes. "Ike had enjoyed the luxury of endorsing civil rights in broad terms, knowing full well that much of segregation law was a state and local matter. Little Rock ended that."

Two days after the Army troops arrived in Little Rock, Eisenhower decided to address the nation on prime-time television. This surprised his attorney general, Herbert Brownell, who had been prodding Eisenhower for years to act more boldly on civil rights. The president wrote most of the speech himself, including a passage, suggested by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, arguing that violent opposition to racial integration was weakening America's influence and prestige in the world.

In the speech, Eisenhower lauded the desegregation efforts of other Southern communities and their willingness to comply with federal law. This was a new tack for the president, who had refused to endorse Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court's decision declaring segregated public schools unconstitutional. Nor had he denounced the murder of Emmett Till by racist thugs in Mississippi in 1955, despite pleas by the teenage boy's mother.

"He feared that moralizing from the bully pulpit would raise not only awareness, but also the collective blood pressure of the South," Mr. Pipes writes. "He saw no point in riling an already angry population. . . . To put it bluntly, Eisenhower had little interest in trying to change the minds of millions of Southerners."

But he had learned a lesson from Little Rock. His view had been, as Mr. Pipes puts it, that "segregationists and civil rights advocates were cut from the same cloth." In his dealings with Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus, he learned otherwise.

Faubus betrayed Eisenhower. In the midst of the Little Rock crisis--as Arkansas's National Guard was blocking the nine black students from Central High--Faubus had agreed to meet the president in Newport, R.I. At the end of their 20-minute talk, Faubus gave the president the clear impression that he would change the National Guard's orders, requiring it to protect the black students as they entered Central High. But Faubus didn't follow through. Eisenhower felt double-crossed and told Brownell: "You were right. Faubus broke his word." The president then took the next step, dispatching the 101st Airborne.

Mr. Pipes is not a professional historian. He is a public-relations consultant and speechwriter who worked in the Bush White House from 2002 to 2005. But he has written a highly readable and credible account of Eisenhower's struggle with race and civil rights. While sympathetic, he doesn't sugarcoat Eisenhower's qualms about desegregation or excuse his unwillingness to move decisively before Little Rock.Eisenhower famously regretted his appointment of Earl Warren as chief justice. (Warren served in that role from 1953 to 1969.) Warren confronted Eisenhower about the president's feelings toward him when they flew together to Winston Churchill's funeral in 1965. Eisenhower explained that it was Warren's liberal rulings on national security that had upset him. He didn't mention Brown v. Board of Education, and understandably so: Years earlier Eisenhower had told an aide, privately, that he thought the Brown decision was wrong; by 1965, he had concluded that it was right.

Mr. Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard and co-host, with Morton Kondracke, of "The Beltway Boys" on Fox News Channel. You can purchase "Ike's Final Battle" at the OpinionJournal bookstore here.

Time for Jackson, Sharpton to Step DownPair See Potential for Profit, Attention in Imus IncidentBy JASON WHITLOCKAOL

Sports Commentary

I’m calling for Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the president and vice president of Black America, to step down.

Their leadership is stale. Their ideas are outdated. And they don’t give a damn about us.

We need to take a cue from White America and re-elect our leadership every four years. White folks realize that power corrupts. That’s why they placed term limits on the presidency. They know if you leave a man in power too long he quits looking out for the interest of his constituency and starts looking out for his own best interest.

We’ve turned Jesse and Al into Supreme Court justices. They get to speak for us for a lifetime.

Why?

If judged by the results they’ve produced the last 20 years, you’d have to regard their administration as a total failure. Seriously, compared to Martin and Malcolm and the freedoms and progress their leadership produced, Jesse and Al are an embarrassment.

Their job the last two decades was to show black people how to take advantage of the opportunities Martin and Malcolm won.

Have we at the level we should have? No.

Rather than inspire us to seize hard-earned opportunities, Jesse and Al have specialized in blackmailing white folks for profit and attention. They were at it again last week, helping to turn radio shock jock Don Imus’ stupidity into a world-wide crisis that reached its crescendo Tuesday afternoon when Rutgers women’s basketball coach C. Vivian Stringer led a massive pity party/recruiting rally.

Hey, what Imus said, calling the Rutgers players "nappy-headed hos," was ignorant, insensitive and offensive. But so are many of the words that come out of the mouths of radio shock jocks/comedians.

Imus’ words did no real damage. Let me tell you what damaged us this week: the sports cover of Tuesday’s USA Today. This country’s newspaper of record published a story about the NFL and crime and ran a picture of 41 NFL players who were arrested in 2006. By my count, 39 of those players were black.

You want to talk about a damaging, powerful image, an image that went out across the globe?

We’re holding news conferences about Imus when the behavior of NFL players is painting us as lawless and immoral. Come on. We can do better than that. Jesse and Al are smarter than that.

Had Imus’ predictably poor attempt at humor not been turned into an international incident by the deluge of media coverage, 97 percent of America would’ve never known what Imus said. His platform isn’t that large and it has zero penetration into the sports world.

Imus certainly doesn’t resonate in the world frequented by college women. The insistence by these young women that they have been emotionally scarred by an old white man with no currency in their world is laughably dishonest.

The Rutgers players are nothing more than pawns in a game being played by Jackson, Sharpton and Stringer.

Jesse and Al are flexing their muscle and setting up their next sting. Bringing down Imus, despite his sincere attempts at apologizing, would serve notice to their next potential victim that it is far better to pay up than stand up to Jesse and Al James.

Stringer just wanted her 15 minutes to make the case that she’s every bit as important as Pat Summitt and Geno Auriemma. By the time Stringer’s rambling, rapping and rhyming 30-minute speech was over, you’d forgotten that Tennessee won the national championship and just assumed a racist plot had been hatched to deny the Scarlet Knights credit for winning it all.

Maybe that’s the real crime. Imus’ ignorance has taken attention away from Candace Parker’s and Summitt’s incredible accomplishment. Or maybe it was Sharpton’s, Stringer’s and Jackson’s grandstanding that moved the spotlight from Tennessee to New Jersey?

None of this over-the-top grandstanding does Black America any good.

We can’t win the war over verbal disrespect and racism when we have so obviously and blatantly surrendered the moral high ground on the issue. Jesse and Al might win the battle with Imus and get him fired or severely neutered. But the war? We don’t stand a chance in the war. Not when everybody knows “nappy-headed ho’s” is a compliment compared to what we allow black rap artists to say about black women on a daily basis.

We look foolish and cruel for kicking a man who went on Sharpton’s radio show and apologized. Imus didn’t pull a Michael Richards and schedule an interview on Letterman. Imus went to the Black vice president’s house, acknowledged his mistake and asked for forgiveness.

Let it go and let God.

We have more important issues to deal with than Imus. If we are unwilling to clean up the filth and disrespect we heap on each other, nothing will change with our condition. You can fire every Don Imus in the country, and our incarceration rate, fatherless-child rate, illiteracy rate and murder rate will still continue to skyrocket.

A man who doesn’t respect himself wastes his breath demanding that others respect him.

We don’t respect ourselves right now. If we did, we wouldn’t call each other the N-word. If we did, we wouldn’t let people with prison values define who we are in music and videos. If we did, we wouldn’t call black women bitches and hos and abandon them when they have our babies.

If we had the proper level of self-respect, we wouldn’t act like it’s only a crime when a white man disrespects us. We hold Imus to a higher standard than we hold ourselves. That’s a (freaking) shame.

We need leadership that is interested in fixing the culture we’ve adopted. We need leadership that makes all of us take tremendous pride in educating ourselves. We need leadership that can reach professional athletes and entertainers and get them to understand that they’re ambassadors and play an important role in defining who we are and what values our culture will embrace.

It’s time for Jesse and Al to step down. They’ve had 25 years to lead us. Other than their accountants, I’d be hard pressed to find someone who has benefited from their administration.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is in an uproar over a decision by Chair Naomi C. Earp to move its 500-employee headquarters from fine offices in downtown to a "developing" -- but not quite arrived -- area in desolate Northeast near the old Woodie's warehouse on New York Avenue.

At a hostile meeting yesterday to quell a growing rebellion, Earp told several hundred employees -- and others viewing on closed-circuit television -- that "the determining factor is price" in her decision and that employees "should not overreact to concerns about safety."The agency has been at 18th and L streets NW since then-Chairman Clarence Thomas blocked Reagan administration efforts in 1989 to ship it to the suburbs. The downtown location also houses the Washington field office, which is where people go to file discrimination complaints.But the current landlord didn't renew the lease, and Earp said she did not want to "pick a fight with" the General Services Administration over the location. So the employees -- mostly civil rights lawyers -- are out by July 2008.

Some employees surveyed the new neighborhood. They found, according to an e-mail Monday about their field trip, that across from the proposed headquarters there's a seven-acre empty lot with "lots of garbage, empty wine and liquor bottles, broken glass, and condoms ringing the perimeter of the (chain link) fence." The nearest business is a "dilapidated liquor store two blocks away."

There are also warehouses in the area and self-storage buildings and, across from the employee parking lot, another big vacant lot. There are a few small dilapidated buildings and a building under construction, the surveyors reported.

For lunch, instead of Luigi's, the Palm or several excellent Asian bistros near the current headquarters, there'll be only a McDonald's 3 1/2 blocks away and a Wendy's a block beyond that. For a change of pace, there's the upscale Chez Roi, also known as Roy Rogers, just four blocks away.Some employees are disabled, opponents of the move note, and on dark winter evenings they would be especially vulnerable to criminals. The McDonald's parking lot, next door to the city's largest methadone clinic, was named in 2002 "as being one of the largest open-air drug markets in the region." "It is unclear whether this has improved," the employees said.Still, the area is clearly changing. And the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives headquarters is nearby, and those employees don't seem to be worried about crime.

"Give me a handgun and a bulletproof vest and an ATF windbreaker, and I wouldn't worry either," an unhappy EEOC official told us.

After vetoing the Democratic supplemental budget, he has now threatened a veto of the Hate Crimes bill passed by the House last week. Constitutional scholars are rightly celebrating Mr. Bush's intervention.

Democrats passed the legislation to federalize hate crimes at the bidding of civil rights groups, feminists and gay rights activists. The bill amends the federal criminal code to prohibit willfully causing bodily injury to any person because of their race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability.

The bill was inspired by detestable crimes like the murders of James Byrd and Matthew Shepard. But as Timothy Lynch, a legal expert at the Cato Institute, notes: "Every act of violence against a victim that would be protected by this new federal law is already a felony crime in every state in America. What's new here and inadvisable is the criminalization of the thought or motivation, not the deed itself."

The House bill creates a peculiar pecking order of victims, in which crimes against some groups in America are classified as more tolerable than crimes against others. As long as we're going down this road, some Republicans argued that Congress should at least make sure all definable groups receive hate crime protection -- not just those groups Democrats claim as their own voting blocs. Nonetheless, an amendment to protect members of the armed forces was defeated by the Democrats. An amendment to protect senior citizens was defeated, as was one to protect pregnant women. What about rich people? We know from the demented and hate-filled writings of Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho that he loathed the wealthy.

For more than a decade the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been required to compile data on hate crimes. Curiously, although blacks are at least 30 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, blacks are three to five times more likely to be classified as victims of racially motivated crimes than whites. And the greatest hate motivated crime in America in decades, the 9/11 attacks, was somehow not classified as a hate crime. Perhaps too many of the thousands of victims were straight, white, men.

During one exchange in a Judiciary Committee markup, Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas asked: "If a minister was giving a sermon, a Bible study or any kind of written or spoken message saying that homosexuality was a serious sin, and a person in the congregation went out and committed a crime against a homosexual, would the minister be protected from being charged with the crime of incitement?" Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama said "no." The Democrats voted down amendments protecting freedom of thought, religion, conscience and speech in America.

Mr. Gohmert notes that this legislation absurdly tells the criminal: "If you are going to shoot me, brutalize me or hurt me, please, please don't hate me. Make it a random, senseless act of violence."

Boys on the BusA black school-bus driver lost her job "because she used the 'n-word' in front of a black student," the Des Moines Register reports:

Anita Anderson, 48, of Des Moines was fired two days after the incident on her bus. According to state records, Anderson was driving students from Monroe Elementary School when a boy became disruptive and belligerent.

Anderson testified at a state hearing on her request for unemployment benefits: "I kept asking him to sit down. And he kept on and on. He said he was going to bust me in my face."

After she told the boy he should not speak to her that way, Anderson muttered under her breath, she said.

"I was talking to myself," she testified. "I was driving, and I said the word. You know, the 'n-word.' But I wasn't talking to the student; I was just talking to myself."

Anderson testified that a girl behind her overheard the remark and told others on the bus. That prompted another outburst from the boy who had threatened her.

"That little boy kept saying, 'Oh, when we get to the bus stop my mom and dad is going to beat you down. Oh, we're going to bust you in your face,' " Anderson testified.

When she finished her route and returned to the bus garage, she was told that the student's mother had complained that the epithet was directed at her son.

There's no excuse for what Anderson said, and she said at an unemployment hearing that she regretted the remark:

"I just couldn't even explain to you how sorrowful I am that the word came out of my mouth," she said. "I'm a Christian. . . . I'm also an African American. I know how whites or Caucasians or different people perceive that word."

But the real question is, what are the authorities doing about the boy who repeatedly threatened a bus driver? Did his mother discipline him for his misconduct, and if not, why does she still have custody?

John LeoLet the Segregation CommenceSeparatist graduations proliferate at UCLA.13 June 2007

Commencement weekend is hard to plan at the University of California, Los Angeles. The university now has so many separate identity-group graduations that scheduling them not to conflict with one another is a challenge. The women’s studies graduation and the Chicana/Chicano studies graduation are both set for 10 AM Saturday. The broader Hispanic graduation, “Raza,” is in near-conflict with the black graduation, which starts just an hour later.

Planning was easier before a new crop of ethnic groups pushed for inclusion. Students of Asian heritage were once content with the Asian–Pacific Islanders ceremony. But now there are separate Filipino and Vietnamese commencements, and some talk of a Cambodian one in the future. Years ago, UCLA sponsored an Iranian graduation, but the school’s commencement office couldn’t tell me if the event was still around. The entire Middle East may yet be a fertile source for UCLA commencements.

Not all ethnic and racial graduations are well attended. The 2003 figures at UCLA showed that while 300 of 855 Hispanic students attended, only 170 out of 1,874 Asian-Americans did.

Some students are presumably eligible for four or five graduations. A gay student with a Native American father and a Filipino mother could attend the Asian, Filipino, and American Indian ceremonies, plus the mainstream graduation and the Lavender Graduation for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered students.

Graduates usually wear identity-group markers—a Filipino stole or a Vietnamese sash, for instance, or a rainbow tassel at the Lavender event. Promoters of ethnic and racial graduations often talk about the strong sense of community that they favor. But it is a sense of community based on blood, a dubious and historically dangerous organizing principle.

The organizers also sometimes argue that identity-group graduations make sense for practical reasons. They say that about 3,000 graduating seniors show up for UCLA’s “regular” graduation, making it a massive and impersonal event. At the more intimate identity-group events, foreign-born parents and relatives hear much of the ceremony in their native tongues. The Filipino event is so small—about 100 students— that each grad gets to speak for 30 seconds.

But the core reason for separatist graduations is the obvious one: on campus, assimilation is a hostile force, the domestic version of American imperialism. On many campuses, identity-group training begins with separate freshman orientation programs for nonwhites, who arrive earlier and are encouraged to bond before the first Caucasian freshmen arrive. Some schools have separate orientations for gays as well. Administrations tend to foster separatism by arguing that bias is everywhere, justifying double standards that favor identity groups.

Four years ago Ward Connerly, then a regent of the University of California, tried to pass a resolution to stop funding of ethnic graduations and gay freshman orientations. He changed his mind and asked to withdraw his proposal, but the regents wanted to vote on it and defeated it in committee 6–3.

No major objections to ethnic graduations have emerged since. As in so many areas of American life, the preposterous is now normal.

John Leo is the editor of the Manhattan Institute’s mindingthecampus.com.

THEN AND NOWWSJRacial Role Reversal What the Scottsboro Boys and the Duke lacrosse players have in common.

BY JOHN STEELE GORDON Wednesday, June 20, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

Imagine this: In a Southern town, a woman accuses several men of rape. Despite the woman's limited credibility and ever-shifting story, the community and its legal establishment immediately decide the men are guilty. Their protestations of innocence are dismissed out of hand, exculpatory evidence is ignored.

The Duke rape case, right? No, the Scottsboro case that began in 1931, in the darkest days of the Jim Crow South.

The two cases offer a remarkable insight into how very, very far this country has come in race relations, and alas, in some ways how little. For race is central to why both cases became notorious. In Scottsboro, Ala., of course, the accusers were white and the accused was black. In Durham, N.C., it was the other way around.

On March 25, 1931, a group of nine young black men got into a fight with a group of whites while riding a freight train near Paint Rock, Ala. All but one of the whites were forced to jump off the train. But when it reached Paint Rock, the blacks were arrested. Two white women, dressed in boys clothing, were found on the train as well, Victoria Price, 21, and Ruby Bates, 17. Unemployed mill workers, they both had worked as prostitutes in Huntsville. Apparently to avoid getting into trouble themselves, they told a tale of having been brutally gang raped by the nine blacks.The blacks were taken to the jail in Scottsboro, the county seat. Because the circumstances of the women's story--black men attacking and raping white women--fit the prevailing racial paradigm of the local white population, guilt was assumed and the governor was forced to call out the National Guard to prevent a lynch mob from hanging the men on the spot. The nine were indicted on March 30 and, by the end of April, all had been tried, convicted and sentenced to death (except for the one who was 13 years old, who was sentenced to life in prison).

A year later, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the convictions of those on death row, except for one who was determined to be a juvenile. By this time, however, the "Scottsboro Boys" had become a national and even international story, with rallies taking place in many cities in the North. Thousands of letters poured into the Alabama courts and the governor's office demanding justice.

The International Labor Defense, the legal arm of the Communist Party USA, provided competent legal help, and the convictions were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court because the defendants had not received adequate counsel. Samuel Leibowitz, a highly successful New York trial lawyer (he would later serve on the state's highest court) was hired to defend the accused in a second trial, held in Decatur, Ala. This turned out to be a tactical error, as Leibowitz was perceived by the local jury pool--all of them white, of course--as an outsider, a Jew and a communist (which he was not). Even though Ruby Bates repudiated her earlier testimony and said no rape had taken place, the accused were again convicted, this time the jury believing that Ruby Bates had been bribed to perjure herself.

Again the sentences were overturned, and in 1937--six years after the case began--four of the defendants had the charges dropped. One pleaded guilty to having assaulted the sheriff (and was sentenced to 20 years) and the other four were found guilty, once again, of rape. Eventually, as Jim Crow began to yield to the civil rights movement, they were paroled or pardoned, except for one who had escaped from prison and fled to Michigan. When he was caught in the 1950s, the governor of Michigan refused to allow his extradition to Alabama.

It is now clear to everyone that the nine Scottsboro boys were guilty only of being black.

When the accuser in the Duke case charged rape, the district attorney--in the midst of a tough primary election--saw an opportunity to curry favor with Durham's black community and exploit the town-gown tension found in every college town. He ran with it, inflaming public opinion against the accused at every opportunity.To be sure, there was no lynch mob, which happily is almost inconceivable today. But many Duke University students and faculty, and many members of the media (Nancy Grace of Court TV comes to mind), simply plugged the alleged circumstances into their racial paradigm--wealthy white college jocks partying and behaving badly with regard to a poor black woman--and pronounced the Duke boys guilty. Wanted posters went up on campus with pictures of the accused; 88 members of the faculty sponsored an ad in the college paper effectively supporting the posters; and the university president suspended two of the accused upon their indictment (the third had already graduated), cancelled the rest of the season for the lacrosse team, and forced the resignation of the team coach.

Here is where the real difference between the Scottsboro boys and the Duke boys kicked in: not race but money. The Scottsboro boys were destitute and spent years in jail, while the Duke boys were all from families who could afford first-class legal talent. Their lawyers quickly began blowing hole after hole in the case and releasing the facts to the media until it was obvious that a miscarriage of justice had occurred. The three Duke boys were guilty only of being white and affluent.

The district attorney won his election. But when the case fell apart and his almost grotesque malfeasance was exposed, he first resigned his office and ultimately was disbarred from the practice of law. Duke University has just settled with the three students it treated so shamefully for an undisclosed, but given the university's legal exposure, undoubtedly substantial sum. Meanwhile, the 88 members of the faculty have yet to apologize for a rush to judgment that was racist at its heart.

The country has come a long, long way in regard to race relations since 1931. But we have not yet reached the promised land where race is irrelevant. Far too many people are still being judged according to the color of their skin, not the content of their character, let alone the evidence.Mr. Gordon is the author of "An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power" (HarperCollins, 2004).

There is nothing so dangerous as a Southern liberal hoping to be invited to a Graydon Carter party.

As is now well-known, Durham prosecutor Mike Nifong falsely accused three white Duke lacrosse players of gang-raping a stripper, even as evidence piled up proving it never happened. In the weeks after an unstable stripper — or, since this is not a Hollywood movie, "a stripper" — accused the players of rape, Nifong stated on national TV: "I am convinced that there was a rape." He called the players "hooligans," contemptuously sneering that their "daddies could buy them expensive lawyers."

Envy is an emotion well-known for producing model behavior.

Revealing his own motives, Nifong said defense attorneys for the non-indicted players "were almost disappointed that their clients didn't get indicted so they could be a part of this spectacle here in Durham." Hello, Vanity Fair? Did you see where I talked about their "daddies"?

The Arianna Huffington of the legal profession might still have made his star turn at a Vanity Fair party, but for the fortuity of the defense lawyers discovering that he had tried to hide DNA evidence from the defendants, revealing that the stripper, Crystal Gail Mangum, had the DNA of four different men in or on her person, including the driver who took her to stripping gigs and enough other men to bring a class-action suit against her.

None of the DNA matched any Duke lacrosse players, who are starting to look like the only adult males in the Durham area who haven't had sex with Mangum.

Nifong has tried to portray himself as simply making "mistakes." This is absurd. Not even a half-wit like Nifong could have believed "something happened in that bathroom," as he said during his disbarment hearing last weekend. He was willing to send three innocent men to prison to improve his electoral viability in a heavily black district and to become a liberal hero in Manhattan salons.

Admittedly, Nifong studiously refused to take a peek at the evidence. On March 29, 2006, he told reporters he knew a rape had occurred based on — I quote — "my reading of the report of the emergency-room nurse." That report was not given to the police until April 5, 2006, making it the equivalent of the forged Nigerian letter Joe Wilson claims to have debunked eight months before it surfaced at the CIA.

But there were some facts even Nifong couldn't have missed.

He knew, for example, that the cab driver who picked up accused "rapist" Reade Seligmann had signed a sworn statement attesting to the fact that the accused was in his cab when the rape was allegedly taking place.

We know Nifong's office knew about the cab driver because the police soon picked him up on a 3-year-old shoplifting charge. The cabdriver claims that when the police came to arrest him, they asked "if I had anything new to say about the lacrosse case." When he said no, they arrested him. He was tried on the 3-year-old case and acquitted.

Nifong also knew that the second "exotic dancer" at the party called the rape allegation a "crock" and said she had been separated from Mangum for no more than five minutes all night. In other words, another stripper knew Mangum wasn't credible, but Nifong based his entire case on her — or rather on one version of her multiple stories.

We know Nifong knew about the second stripper's statement because his office was soon offering her favorable bail treatment for violating probation. She took the deal — and suddenly decided it was possible a rape had occurred.

Mangum had made similar accusations of gang rape 10 years earlier, but her own father denied it had happened and no charges were ever brought. We know Nifong knew about Mangum's prior false accusation because when he was asked about it, he responded: "All the facts are not yet known, and many of the so-called 'facts' that have been reported and commented on are simply wrong." As we now know, the only "wrong" facts circulating in the press were the ones Nifong had put there.

Nifong knew that Mangum made Tawana Brawley look like Billy Graham: She kept changing her story, altering the number of men who raped her, and was unable to identify her attackers.

Except one. Mangum confidently and repeatedly identified only one lacrosse player as one of her rapists: Brad Ross. Nifong knew this because Brad Ross promptly gave the police proof that he was at North Carolina State University with his girlfriend the night of the party.

This investigation wasn't a mistake — it was malice.

The media love to drone on about the explosive combination of "race and sex" — and they'll wait forever for a single non-hoax case to prove it! In fact, the truly explosive combination is "liberal" and "mediocrity."

Half-bright liberals think Hollywood fantasies are real life. And in Hollywood, conservatives like Rush Limbaugh are never fabulously rich and successful. Conservative Christians like Tom DeLay are never savvy, influential congressmen. And handsome boys from good families are never nice.

Nifong was supposed to look like Gregory Peck — not like Bob Wexler! But it's the lacrosse players who look like Gregory Peck.

Second-rate liberals who went to mediocre schools and married mediocre women are burning with jealousy from their nondescript, mediocre jobs. So they use their government jobs to attack their betters and sneer about the players' "daddies."

Like so much injustice in America, this whole sick spectacle was the revenge of the mediocre against the successful. Stupid and envious is a bad combo platter.

NY TimesThe Day Louis Armstrong Made Noise By DAVID MARGOLICKPublished: September 23, 2007

FIFTY years ago this week, all eyes were on Little Rock, Ark., where nine black students were trying, for the first time, to desegregate a major Southern high school. With fewer than 150 blacks, the town of Grand Forks, N.D., hardly figured to be a key front in that battle — until, that is, Larry Lubenow talked to Louis Armstrong.

On the night of Sept. 17, 1957, two weeks after the Little Rock Nine were first barred from Central High School, the jazz trumpeter happened to be on tour with his All Stars band in Grand Forks. Larry Lubenow, meanwhile, was a 21-year-old journalism student and jazz fan at the University of North Dakota, moonlighting for $1.75 an hour at The Grand Forks Herald.

Shortly before Mr. Armstrong’s concert, Mr. Lubenow’s editor sent him to the Dakota Hotel, where Mr. Armstrong was staying, to see if he could land an interview. Perhaps sensing trouble — Mr. Lubenow was, he now says, a “rabble-rouser and liberal” — his boss laid out the ground rules: “No politics,” he ordered. That hardly seemed necessary, for Mr. Armstrong rarely ventured into such things anyway. “I don’t get involved in politics,” he once said. “I just blow my horn.”

But Mr. Lubenow was thinking about other things, race relations among them. The bell captain, with whom he was friendly, had told him that Mr. Armstrong was quietly making history in Grand Forks, as he had done innumerable times and ways before, by becoming the first black man ever to stay at what was then the best hotel in town. Mr. Lubenow knew, too, that Grand Forks had its own link to Little Rock: it was the hometown of Judge Ronald Davies, who’d just ordered that the desegregation plan in Little Rock proceed after Gov. Orval Faubus of Arkansas and a band of local segregationists tried to block it.

As Mr. Armstrong prepared to play that night — oddly enough, at Grand Forks’s own Central High School — members of the Arkansas National Guard ringed the school in Little Rock, ordered to keep the black students out. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s meeting with Governor Faubus three days earlier in Newport, R.I., had ended inconclusively. Central High School was open, but the black children stayed home.

Mr. Lubenow was first told he couldn’t talk to Mr. Armstrong until after the concert. That wouldn’t do. With the connivance of the bell captain, he snuck into Mr. Armstrong’s suite with a room service lobster dinner. And Mr. Armstrong, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, agreed to talk. Mr. Lubenow stuck initially to his editor’s script, asking Mr. Armstrong to name his favorite musician. (Bing Crosby, it turned out.) But soon he brought up Little Rock, and he could not believe what he heard. “It’s getting almost so bad a colored man hasn’t got any country,” a furious Mr. Armstrong told him. President Eisenhower, he charged, was “two faced,” and had “no guts.” For Governor Faubus, he used a double-barreled hyphenated expletive, utterly unfit for print. The two settled on something safer: “uneducated plow boy.” The euphemism, Mr. Lubenow says, was far more his than Mr. Armstrong’s.

Mr. Armstrong bitterly recounted some of his experiences touring in the Jim Crow South. He then sang the opening bar of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” inserting obscenities into the lyrics and prompting Velma Middleton, the vocalist who toured with Mr. Armstrong and who had joined them in the room, to hush him up.

Mr. Armstrong had been contemplating a good-will tour to the Soviet Union for the State Department. “They ain’t so cold but what we couldn’t bruise them with happy music,” he had said. Now, though, he confessed to having second thoughts. “The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell,” he said, offering further choice words about the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. “The people over there ask me what’s wrong with my country. What am I supposed to say?”

Mr. Lubenow, who came from a small North Dakota farming community, was shocked by what he heard, but he also knew he had a story; he skipped the concert and went back to the paper to write it up. It was too late to get it in his own paper; nor would the Associated Press editor in Minneapolis, dubious that Mr. Armstrong could have said such things, put it on the national wire, at least until Mr. Lubenow could prove he hadn’t made it all up. So the next morning Mr. Lubenow returned to the Dakota Hotel and, as Mr. Armstrong shaved, had the Herald photographer take their picture together. Then Mr. Lubenow showed Mr. Armstrong what he’d written. “Don’t take nothing out of that story,” Mr. Armstrong declared. “That’s just what I said, and still say.” He then wrote “solid” on the bottom of the yellow copy paper, and signed his name.---Page 2 of 2)

The article ran all over the country. Douglas Edwards and John Cameron Swayze broadcast it on the evening news. The Russians, an anonymous government spokesman warned, would relish everything Mr. Armstrong had said. A radio station in Hattiesburg, Miss., threw out all of Mr. Armstrong’s records. Sammy Davis Jr. criticized Mr. Armstrong for not speaking out earlier. But Jackie Robinson, Sugar Ray Robinson, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt and Marian Anderson quickly backed him up.

Mostly, there was surprise, especially among blacks. Secretary Dulles might just as well have stood up at the United Nations and led a chorus of the Russian national anthem, declared Jet magazine, which once called Mr. Armstrong an “Uncle Tom.” Mr. Armstrong had long tried to convince people throughout the world that “the Negro’s lot in America is a happy one,” it observed, but in one bold stroke he’d pulled nearly 15 million American blacks to his bosom. Any white confused by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s polite talk need only listen to Mr. Armstrong, The Amsterdam News declared. Mr. Armstrong’s words had the “explosive effect of an H-bomb,” said The Chicago Defender. “He may not have been grammatical, but he was eloquent.”

His road manager quickly put out that Mr. Armstrong had been tricked, and regretted his statements, but Mr. Armstrong would have none of that. “I said what somebody should have said a long time ago,” he said the following day in Montevideo, Minn., where he gave his next concert. He closed that show with “The Star-Spangled Banner” — this time, minus the obscenities.

Mr. Armstrong was to pay a price for his outspokenness. There were calls for boycotts of his concerts. The Ford Motor Company threatened to pull out of a Bing Crosby special on which Mr. Armstrong was to appear. Van Cliburn’s manager refused to let him perform a duet with Mr. Armstrong on Steve Allen’s talk show.

But it didn’t really matter. On Sept. 24, President Eisenhower sent 1,200 paratroopers from the 101st Airborne into Little Rock, and the next day soldiers escorted the nine students into Central High School. Mr. Armstrong exulted. “If you decide to walk into the schools with the little colored kids, take me along, Daddy,” he wired the president. “God bless you.” As for Mr. Lubenow, who now works in public relations in Cedar Park, Tex., he got $3.50 for writing the story and, perhaps, for changing history. But his editor was miffed — he’d gotten into politics, after all. Within a week, he left the paper. Page 2 of 2)

The article ran all over the country. Douglas Edwards and John Cameron Swayze broadcast it on the evening news. The Russians, an anonymous government spokesman warned, would relish everything Mr. Armstrong had said. A radio station in Hattiesburg, Miss., threw out all of Mr. Armstrong’s records. Sammy Davis Jr. criticized Mr. Armstrong for not speaking out earlier. But Jackie Robinson, Sugar Ray Robinson, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt and Marian Anderson quickly backed him up.

Mostly, there was surprise, especially among blacks. Secretary Dulles might just as well have stood up at the United Nations and led a chorus of the Russian national anthem, declared Jet magazine, which once called Mr. Armstrong an “Uncle Tom.” Mr. Armstrong had long tried to convince people throughout the world that “the Negro’s lot in America is a happy one,” it observed, but in one bold stroke he’d pulled nearly 15 million American blacks to his bosom. Any white confused by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s polite talk need only listen to Mr. Armstrong, The Amsterdam News declared. Mr. Armstrong’s words had the “explosive effect of an H-bomb,” said The Chicago Defender. “He may not have been grammatical, but he was eloquent.”

His road manager quickly put out that Mr. Armstrong had been tricked, and regretted his statements, but Mr. Armstrong would have none of that. “I said what somebody should have said a long time ago,” he said the following day in Montevideo, Minn., where he gave his next concert. He closed that show with “The Star-Spangled Banner” — this time, minus the obscenities.

Mr. Armstrong was to pay a price for his outspokenness. There were calls for boycotts of his concerts. The Ford Motor Company threatened to pull out of a Bing Crosby special on which Mr. Armstrong was to appear. Van Cliburn’s manager refused to let him perform a duet with Mr. Armstrong on Steve Allen’s talk show.

But it didn’t really matter. On Sept. 24, President Eisenhower sent 1,200 paratroopers from the 101st Airborne into Little Rock, and the next day soldiers escorted the nine students into Central High School. Mr. Armstrong exulted. “If you decide to walk into the schools with the little colored kids, take me along, Daddy,” he wired the president. “God bless you.” As for Mr. Lubenow, who now works in public relations in Cedar Park, Tex., he got $3.50 for writing the story and, perhaps, for changing history. But his editor was miffed — he’d gotten into politics, after all. Within a week, he left the paper.

Fifty years ago today, riot-trained troops from the 101st Airborne Division escorted nine black students through the doors of Central High School in Little Rock. Just 48 hours earlier, President Eisenhower deployed -- in a single day -- 1,000 troops to restore order and to reassert federal authority in Arkansas's capital city.

Gov. Orval Faubus of Arkansas complains about President Eisenhower's use of federal troops to enforce integration in Little Rock, September 1957. For weeks the entire nation had watched on television as a mob of angry white adults gathered each morning to prevent the nine black students from integrating Central High. It would come to be remembered as one of the ugliest and meanest white mobs of the entire civil rights era. And because of television -- then still a very new medium -- the horrible images of people galvanized by ferocious racial hatred were seared into the national consciousness.

Finally, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus succumbed to a kind of madness, if not to a perverse politics of racial hatred, and withdrew the National Guard from Central High, effectively turning the school over to the raging mob. The nine courageous black students, who had suffered so much to integrate the school, were withdrawn for their own protection. So, for a time, the authority of the mob prevailed over all governmental authority -- local, state and federal. And this was the provocation that pushed a reluctant President Eisenhower to deploy federal troops.

On this 50th anniversary of Eisenhower's troop deployment, the significance of the Little Rock crisis -- its place in history -- is much clearer. I believe it was the beginning of a profoundly different America.

For one thing, it foreshadowed the end of white supremacy as a legitimate authority. The Little Rock crisis was a conflict between two ideas of authority that had always been in tension in American life. The authority behind the Little Rock Nine came from that constellation of principles that define the American democracy -- the idea of individual rights, equality under the law and so on. But in America another authority had always been in play -- the atavistic authority of white supremacy, the idea that no less a power than God had chosen the white race to be ascendant over all other races. This was the authority behind the white mob in Little Rock. In taunting those nine black students, this mob was protecting a "divine right" against the ridiculous democratic notion that all men were created equal.

But the mob lost in Little Rock. Eisenhower enforced democratic authority over white supremacy. He made the point that these two authorities could no longer pretend to coexist in the public schools of even a Southern city. In this way the Little Rock crisis joined black Americans to a world-wide movement. The Mau Maus viciously fought this same nemesis in Kenya, Gandhi peacefully fought it in India, and the very first terrorist bombers fought it in Algeria. But in Little Rock the American government, overcoming two centuries of equivocation, broke off from white supremacy and took up the cause of black revolutionaries -- and so administered white entitlement a decisive defeat.

But the deeper historical importance of the Little Rock crisis follows from the simple fact that it was televised. It was, in fact, the first time that this still fledgling medium was able to make America into a community by rendering up a riveting real-life drama for the country to watch. Compelling personalities emerged, like the despicable and erratic Gov. Faubus, who kept flaunting federal authority like a little potentate. There was Eisenhower himself, whose grandfatherly patience with Faubus seemed to belie a sympathy with this racist's need to hold on to a fading authority. And there was the daily gauntlet that the black students were made to walk -- innocence face to face with evil. And, finally, there was great suspense. How would it all end? Would there by a military clash, another little civil war between North and South?

So Americans watched by the millions and, in this watching, saw something that would change the country fundamentally. Everyday for weeks they saw white people so consumed with racial hatred that they looked bestial and subhuman. When white racism was a confident power, it could look like propriety itself, like good manners. But here, in its insecurity, it was grotesque and shocking. Worse, it was there for the entire world to see, and so it broke through the national denial. The Little Rock crisis revealed the evil at the core of segregation, and it launched the stigmatization of white Americans as racists that persists to this day. After Little Rock whites stood permanently accused. They would have to prove a negative -- that they were not racist -- in order to claim decency. And this need to forever beg one's innocence is the very essence of white guilt.

Of course, it was the special genius of the civil rights leaders of that era to elicit displays of white evil by confronting whites with black innocence -- often children and teenagers, neatly dressed and scrupulously groomed, aspiring only to what all humans aspire to, a decent education or the right to eat at a lunch counter. Still, these leaders couldn't elicit what wasn't there. White evil was there. And the greatest significance of the Little Rock crisis was that it put on display a distinct white moral inferiority.

This introduced a new accountability into white American life. Americans had always thought themselves a great people -- more solidly grounded in the morality of fairness than any other people. Moreover, it was Western culture that had evolved the kind of moral system that made Little Rock look so evil. But, in the end, all this meant was that the good citizens of Little Rock should have known better. Evil was evil. And, after Little Rock, white America began to become accountable for its racial evil.

But Americans have not been particularly good at integrating this kind of accountability. We are a nation with a powerful investment in the idea of our own fundamental innocence. Our can-do optimism and ingenuity are based on the faith that we are a decent, open, and generous people. This is our identity. And when we shame ourselves, as in Little Rock, there is an impulse to get busy; to do something big that redeems the shame and proves that its implications about us are false. This is, of course, a form of denial. In our busyness we may dissociate from the shame, but this is no proof that we have integrated its meaning.

For the most part, this is how white America came to handle its new accountability in the civil rights era. The country got busy self-consciously redeeming itself. Redemption would be our big, ingenious achievement. If freedom and opportunity and wealth had always been the special mandates of American life, suddenly redemption was added to the list. And, as the civil rights movement worked its way through many more Little Rocks, as a movement for women's equality burst forth, and as the Vietnam War came to be held against America, the idea of American evil expanded and, thus, redemption became more and more entrenched as a national mandate.

By the mid 1960s this mandate had already given us a new illiberal liberalism -- a busybody, interventionist liberalism that was more bent on erecting an American redemption than ensuring freedom. The Great Society wanted to make America look like a country in which Little Rock could never have happened. It failed because it was a venture in denial rather than in realistic social transformation. And today's "diversity" will fail because it, too, is only a denial -- a kitsch that gives us an image of an America shorn of Little Rocks.

But on this 50th anniversary of the Little Rock crisis, it is important to remember that this evil did happen in America, and that no engineered redemption can make us innocent again. And we might also remember that it is better to be chastened than innocent. Innocents don't learn from their sins; the chastened are informed by them.

Mr. Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, is the author of "White Guilt" (HarperCollins, 2006).

Choosing the category of race, culture and humanities for a follow up on crime in America's cities as unearthed in the Wisconsin self defense case from Milwaukee. I speculate that the aggressors and the victim in this case are black because the bad neighborhoods of Milwaukee are primarily black and because race is not covered in the story. If true, it means this tragic, concealed carry story is also about black on black crime. I would be thrilled to be corrected on that, but the major media has a ban on publishing race 'when it isn't part of the story'.

Illegalized self-defense was one factor. Another is our social system of bad incentives. Welfare payments cause dependency and perpetuate unproductive lifestyles. It's still happening today, a decade after 'welfare reform'. The dependency cycle hits blacks disproportionately, and crime is rampant in areas of unproductive density.

Wisconsin was a leader in welfare reform, but they only reformed one type of payment while dozens/hundreds of other federal, state and local programs continued to increase and perpetuate the cycle of poverty. Free health care, food stamps, and section 8 housing are enormous examples, while the payroll tax chops off a huge chunk of the incentive from those on the edge of becoming contributing members, making the jump even less attractive.

Intelligence Failure"In DNA Era, New Worries About Prejudice" reads the headline on an article in yesterday's New York Times. The Times reports that some people are fretting about the implications of new discoveries about genetic differences between races:

The notion that race is more than skin deep, they fear, could undermine principles of equal treatment and opportunity that have relied on the presumption that we are all fundamentally equal. . . .

Nonscientists are already beginning to stitch together highly speculative conclusions about the historically charged subject of race and intelligence from the new biological data. Last month, a blogger in Manhattan described a recently published study that linked several snippets of DNA to high I.Q. An online genetic database used by medical researchers, he told readers, showed that two of the snippets were found more often in Europeans and Asians than in Africans.

No matter that the link between I.Q. and those particular bits of DNA was unconfirmed, or that other high I.Q. snippets are more common in Africans, or that hundreds or thousands of others may also affect intelligence, or that their combined influence might be dwarfed by environmental factors. Just the existence of such genetic differences between races, proclaimed the author of the Half Sigma blog, a 40-year-old software developer, means "the egalitarian theory," that all races are equal, "is proven false."

Note that "the presumption that we are all fundamentally equal" is quite different from the notion "that all races are equal." The former is a moral principle, a premise about the basic dignity of every individual; the latter is an empirical presumption about group averages in measurable traits. Someone with an IQ of 80 is as human as someone with an IQ of 120; and this is so regardless of whether the average IQ of one race is different from that of another.

What worries people like those in the Times story is that racial differences in IQ or other traits seem to lend empirical support to racist theories. But those theories are qualitatively wrong, so that no empirical evidence could make them right. If all individuals are of equal dignity and worth regardless of IQ, then a group is not fundamentally superior or inferior to another group by virtue of differences in average IQ.

It seems that some very smart people mistakenly think that intelligence is a measure of fundamental worth. Maybe they're a little too impressed with their own brilliance.

A Glendale elementary school principal has admitted to telling a 9-year old boy that it is OK to have racist feelings as long as you keep them to yourself.

“As we said to (the boy) when he was in here, in your heart you may have that feeling, and that is OK if that is your personal belief,” Abraham Lincoln Traditional School Principal Virginia Voinovich said in a tape-recorded parent-teacher conference.

The boy was suspended for three days this month for allegedly committing a “hate crime” by using the expression “brown people.” advertisement

In an interview Monday, Voinovich would not address her comments, first saying she didn't remember the incident, then demanding a copy of the recording and finally insisting that she could not talk about a student's discipline.

The circumstances of the boy’s suspension itself raise troubling questions about student discipline, interrogation and oversight at Abraham Lincoln.

According to school officials, the boy made a statement about “brown people” to another elementary student with whom he was having a conflict. They maintain it was his second offense using the phrase.

But the tape recording indicates this only came out after another parent was allowed to question the boy and elicited from him the statement that he “doesn't cooperate with brown people.”

After that was reported to the boy's teacher, he was made to stand in front of his class and publicly confess what he'd said.

The boy maintains that he never said it; that the words were put in his mouth by the parent who questioned him. That parent happens to be the mother of the student with whom he is having a conflict—and she happens to work for Abraham Lincoln as a detention-room officer.

The tape indicates that rather than just spouting off with racial invective, the boy was asked first why he didn't want to cooperate with brown people by the parent/school official.

In court, this might be called entrapment. Not to mention a conflict of interest.

Officials at the Washington Elementary School District, who are supposed to oversee Voinovich, wouldn't comment about the boy’s suspension. They said only the principal is qualified to talk about it.

Well, the boy’s mother is talking, and she is angry. She has also removed her son from the school.

“I want parents to know … that principals can abuse their powers,” Sherry Neve, 35, said. “Principals need to have pro-active supervisors. I want the parents to know that the principal was influencing my son in a way I wouldn't want him to be raised.”

Neve said school officials didn’t advise her of the incident until several days after they questioned her son. When Neve objected to the suspension during the conference, Voinovich told her that she didn't have any rights; that parents give up their rights to discipline when they send a child to school, the tape shows.

“If you don't want that, you can take him out of here,” Voinovich said tersely.

Neve insists that her son is not a racist and that he never differentiated a person's color until the school made it in an issue.

“We were raised to be color blind,” she said. “My children were raised the same way.”

But let's assume for a minute that the boy actually made the comment. Does this make him a racist and guilty of a hate crime? Or does it make him a confused 9-year-old in need of counseling?

Instead of taking an opportunity to educate the boy and get to the root of the problem, the principal taught him another lesson altogether: It's OK to feel like a racist as long as you keep your feelings to yourself.

None of the AboveWhat I.Q. doesn’t tell you about race.by Malcolm Gladwell December 17, 2007

If what I.Q. tests measure is immutable and innate, what explains the Flynn effect—the steady rise in scores across generations?

One Saturday in November of 1984, James Flynn, a social scientist at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, received a large package in the mail. It was from a colleague in Utrecht, and it contained the results of I.Q. tests given to two generations of Dutch eighteen-year-olds. When Flynn looked through the data, he found something puzzling. The Dutch eighteen-year-olds from the nineteen-eighties scored better than those who took the same tests in the nineteen-fifties—and not just slightly better, much better.Curious, Flynn sent out some letters. He collected intelligence-test results from Europe, from North America, from Asia, and from the developing world, until he had data for almost thirty countries. In every case, the story was pretty much the same. I.Q.s around the world appeared to be rising by 0.3 points per year, or three points per decade, for as far back as the tests had been administered. For some reason, human beings seemed to be getting smarter.Flynn has been writing about the implications of his findings—now known as the Flynn effect—for almost twenty-five years. His books consist of a series of plainly stated statistical observations, in support of deceptively modest conclusions, and the evidence in support of his original observation is now so overwhelming that the Flynn effect has moved from theory to fact. What remains uncertain is how to make sense of the Flynn effect. If an American born in the nineteen-thirties has an I.Q. of 100, the Flynn effect says that his children will have I.Q.s of 108, and his grandchildren I.Q.s of close to 120—more than a standard deviation higher. If we work in the opposite direction, the typical teen-ager of today, with an I.Q. of 100, would have had grandparents with average I.Q.s of 82—seemingly below the threshold necessary to graduate from high school. And, if we go back even farther, the Flynn effect puts the average I.Q.s of the schoolchildren of 1900 at around 70, which is to suggest, bizarrely, that a century ago the United States was populated largely by people who today would be considered mentally retarded.

For almost as long as there have been I.Q. tests, there have been I.Q. fundamentalists. H. H. Goddard, in the early years of the past century, established the idea that intelligence could be measured along a single, linear scale. One of his particular contributions was to coin the word “moron.” “The people who are doing the drudgery are, as a rule, in their proper places,” he wrote. Goddard was followed by Lewis Terman, in the nineteen-twenties, who rounded up the California children with the highest I.Q.s, and confidently predicted that they would sit at the top of every profession. In 1969, the psychometrician Arthur Jensen argued that programs like Head Start, which tried to boost the academic performance of minority children, were doomed to failure, because I.Q. was so heavily genetic; and in 1994 Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in “The Bell Curve,” notoriously proposed that Americans with the lowest I.Q.s be sequestered in a “high-tech” version of an Indian reservation, “while the rest of America tries to go about its business.” To the I.Q. fundamentalist, two things are beyond dispute: first, that I.Q. tests measure some hard and identifiable trait that predicts the quality of our thinking; and, second, that this trait is stable—that is, it is determined by our genes and largely impervious to environmental influences.

This is what James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, meant when he told an English newspaper recently that he was “inherently gloomy” about the prospects for Africa. From the perspective of an I.Q. fundamentalist, the fact that Africans score lower than Europeans on I.Q. tests suggests an ineradicable cognitive disability. In the controversy that followed, Watson was defended by the journalist William Saletan, in a three-part series for the online magazine Slate. Drawing heavily on the work of J. Philippe Rushton—a psychologist who specializes in comparing the circumference of what he calls the Negroid brain with the length of the Negroid penis—Saletan took the fundamentalist position to its logical conclusion. To erase the difference between blacks and whites, Saletan wrote, would probably require vigorous interbreeding between the races, or some kind of corrective genetic engineering aimed at upgrading African stock. “Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern,” Saletan declared, claiming to have been “soaking [his] head in each side’s computations and arguments.” One argument that Saletan never soaked his head in, however, was Flynn’s, because what Flynn discovered in his mailbox upsets the certainties upon which I.Q. fundamentalism rests. If whatever the thing is that I.Q. tests measure can jump so much in a generation, it can’t be all that immutable and it doesn’t look all that innate.The very fact that average I.Q.s shift over time ought to create a “crisis of confidence,” Flynn writes in “What Is Intelligence?” (Cambridge; $22), his latest attempt to puzzle through the implications of his discovery. “How could such huge gains be intelligence gains? Either the children of today were far brighter than their parents or, at least in some circumstances, I.Q. tests were not good measures of intelligence.”

The best way to understand why I.Q.s rise, Flynn argues, is to look at one of the most widely used I.Q. tests, the so-called WISC (for Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children). The WISC is composed of ten subtests, each of which measures a different aspect of I.Q. Flynn points out that scores in some of the categories—those measuring general knowledge, say, or vocabulary or the ability to do basic arithmetic—have risen only modestly over time. The big gains on the WISC are largely in the category known as “similarities,” where you get questions such as “In what way are ‘dogs’ and ‘rabbits’ alike?” Today, we tend to give what, for the purposes of I.Q. tests, is the right answer: dogs and rabbits are both mammals. A nineteenth-century American would have said that “you use dogs to hunt rabbits.”

“If the everyday world is your cognitive home, it is not natural to detach abstractions and logic and the hypothetical from their concrete referents,” Flynn writes. Our great-grandparents may have been perfectly intelligent. But they would have done poorly on I.Q. tests because they did not participate in the twentieth century’s great cognitive revolution, in which we learned to sort experience according to a new set of abstract categories. In Flynn’s phrase, we have now had to put on “scientific spectacles,” which enable us to make sense of the WISC questions about similarities. To say that Dutch I.Q. scores rose substantially between 1952 and 1982 was another way of saying that the Netherlands in 1982 was, in at least certain respects, much more cognitively demanding than the Netherlands in 1952. An I.Q., in other words, measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are.This is a critical distinction. When the children of Southern Italian immigrants were given I.Q. tests in the early part of the past century, for example, they recorded median scores in the high seventies and low eighties, a full standard deviation below their American and Western European counterparts. Southern Italians did as poorly on I.Q. tests as Hispanics and blacks did. As you can imagine, there was much concerned talk at the time about the genetic inferiority of Italian stock, of the inadvisability of letting so many second-class immigrants into the United States, and of the squalor that seemed endemic to Italian urban neighborhoods. Sound familiar? These days, when talk turns to the supposed genetic differences in the intelligence of certain races, Southern Italians have disappeared from the discussion. “Did their genes begin to mutate somewhere in the 1930s?” the psychologists Seymour Sarason and John Doris ask, in their account of the Italian experience. “Or is it possible that somewhere in the 1920s, if not earlier, the sociocultural history of Italo-Americans took a turn from the blacks and the Spanish Americans which permitted their assimilation into the general undifferentiated mass of Americans?”The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. “A wise man could only do such-and-such,” they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, “How would a fool do it?” The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the “right” categories. It can be argued that taxonomical categories are a developmental improvement—that is, that the Kpelle would be more likely to advance, technologically and scientifically, if they started to see the world that way. But to label them less intelligent than Westerners, on the basis of their performance on that test, is merely to state that they have different cognitive preferences and habits. And if I.Q. varies with habits of mind, which can be adopted or discarded in a generation, what, exactly, is all the fuss about?When I was growing up, my family would sometimes play Twenty Questions on long car trips. My father was one of those people who insist that the standard categories of animal, vegetable, and mineral be supplemented with a fourth category: “abstract.” Abstract could mean something like “whatever it was that was going through my mind when we drove past the water tower fifty miles back.” That abstract category sounds absurdly difficult, but it wasn’t: it merely required that we ask a slightly different set of questions and grasp a slightly different set of conventions, and, after two or three rounds of practice, guessing the contents of someone’s mind fifty miles ago becomes as easy as guessing Winston Churchill. (There is one exception. That was the trip on which my old roommate Tom Connell chose, as an abstraction, “the Unknown Soldier”—which allowed him legitimately and gleefully to answer “I have no idea” to almost every question. There were four of us playing. We gave up after an hour.) Flynn would say that my father was teaching his three sons how to put on scientific spectacles, and that extra practice probably bumped up all of our I.Q.s a few notches. But let’s be clear about what this means. There’s a world of difference between an I.Q. advantage that’s genetic and one that depends on extended car time with Graham Gladwell.

Flynn is a cautious and careful writer. Unlike many others in the I.Q. debates, he resists grand philosophizing. He comes back again and again to the fact that I.Q. scores are generated by paper-and-pencil tests—and making sense of those scores, he tells us, is a messy and complicated business that requires something closer to the skills of an accountant than to those of a philosopher.

For instance, Flynn shows what happens when we recognize that I.Q. is not a freestanding number but a value attached to a specific time and a specific test. When an I.Q. test is created, he reminds us, it is calibrated or “normed” so that the test-takers in the fiftieth percentile—those exactly at the median—are assigned a score of 100. But since I.Q.s are always rising, the only way to keep that hundred-point benchmark is periodically to make the tests more difficult—to “renorm” them. The original WISC was normed in the late nineteen-forties. It was then renormed in the early nineteen-seventies, as the WISC-R; renormed a third time in the late eighties, as the WISC III; and renormed again a few years ago, as the WISC IV—with each version just a little harder than its predecessor. The notion that anyone “has” an I.Q. of a certain number, then, is meaningless unless you know which WISC he took, and when he took it, since there’s a substantial difference between getting a 130 on the WISC IV and getting a 130 on the much easier WISC.This is not a trivial issue. I.Q. tests are used to diagnose people as mentally retarded, with a score of 70 generally taken to be the cutoff. You can imagine how the Flynn effect plays havoc with that system. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, most states used the WISC-R to make their mental-retardation diagnoses. But since kids—even kids with disabilities—score a little higher every year, the number of children whose scores fell below 70 declined steadily through the end of the eighties. Then, in 1991, the WISC III was introduced, and suddenly the percentage of kids labelled retarded went up. The psychologists Tomoe Kanaya, Matthew Scullin, and Stephen Ceci estimated that, if every state had switched to the WISC III right away, the number of Americans labelled mentally retarded should have doubled.

That is an extraordinary number. The diagnosis of mental disability is one of the most stigmatizing of all educational and occupational classifications—and yet, apparently, the chances of being burdened with that label are in no small degree a function of the point, in the life cycle of the WISC, at which a child happens to sit for his evaluation. “As far as I can determine, no clinical or school psychologists using the WISC over the relevant 25 years noticed that its criterion of mental retardation became more lenient over time,” Flynn wrote, in a 2000 paper. “Yet no one drew the obvious moral about psychologists in the field: They simply were not making any systematic assessment of the I.Q. criterion for mental retardation.”Flynn brings a similar precision to the question of whether Asians have a genetic advantage in I.Q., a possibility that has led to great excitement among I.Q. fundamentalists in recent years. Data showing that the Japanese had higher I.Q.s than people of European descent, for example, prompted the British psychometrician and eugenicist Richard Lynn to concoct an elaborate evolutionary explanation involving the Himalayas, really cold weather, premodern hunting practices, brain size, and specialized vowel sounds. The fact that the I.Q.s of Chinese-Americans also seemed to be elevated has led I.Q. fundamentalists to posit the existence of an international I.Q. pyramid, with Asians at the top, European whites next, and Hispanics and blacks at the bottom.Here was a question tailor-made for James Flynn’s accounting skills. He looked first at Lynn’s data, and realized that the comparison was skewed. Lynn was comparing American I.Q. estimates based on a representative sample of schoolchildren with Japanese estimates based on an upper-income, heavily urban sample. Recalculated, the Japanese average came in not at 106.6 but at 99.2. Then Flynn turned his attention to the Chinese-American estimates. They turned out to be based on a 1975 study in San Francisco’s Chinatown using something called the Lorge-Thorndike Intelligence Test. But the Lorge-Thorndike test was normed in the nineteen-fifties. For children in the nineteen-seventies, it would have been a piece of cake. When the Chinese-American scores were reassessed using up-to-date intelligence metrics, Flynn found, they came in at 97 verbal and 100 nonverbal. Chinese-Americans had slightly lower I.Q.s than white Americans.The Asian-American success story had suddenly been turned on its head. The numbers now suggested, Flynn said, that they had succeeded not because of their higher I.Q.s. but despite their lower I.Q.s. Asians were overachievers. In a nifty piece of statistical analysis, Flynn then worked out just how great that overachievement was. Among whites, virtually everyone who joins the ranks of the managerial, professional, and technical occupations has an I.Q. of 97 or above. Among Chinese-Americans, that threshold is 90. A Chinese-American with an I.Q. of 90, it would appear, does as much with it as a white American with an I.Q. of 97.There should be no great mystery about Asian achievement. It has to do with hard work and dedication to higher education, and belonging to a culture that stresses professional success. But Flynn makes one more observation. The children of that first successful wave of Asian-Americans really did have I.Q.s that were higher than everyone else’s—coming in somewhere around 103. Having worked their way into the upper reaches of the occupational scale, and taken note of how much the professions value abstract thinking, Asian-American parents have evidently made sure that their own children wore scientific spectacles. “Chinese Americans are an ethnic group for whom high achievement preceded high I.Q. rather than the reverse,” Flynn concludes, reminding us that in our discussions of the relationship between I.Q. and success we often confuse causes and effects. “It is not easy to view the history of their achievements without emotion,” he writes. That is exactly right. To ascribe Asian success to some abstract number is to trivialize it.

Two weeks ago, Flynn came to Manhattan to debate Charles Murray at a forum sponsored by the Manhattan Institute. Their subject was the black-white I.Q. gap in America. During the twenty-five years after the Second World War, that gap closed considerably. The I.Q.s of white Americans rose, as part of the general worldwide Flynn effect, but the I.Q.s of black Americans rose faster. Then, for about a period of twenty-five years, that trend stalled—and the question was why.

Murray showed a series of PowerPoint slides, each representing different statistical formulations of the I.Q. gap. He appeared to be pessimistic that the racial difference would narrow in the future. “By the nineteen-seventies, you had gotten most of the juice out of the environment that you were going to get,” he said. That gap, he seemed to think, reflected some inherent difference between the races. “Starting in the nineteen-seventies, to put it very crudely, you had a higher proportion of black kids being born to really dumb mothers,” he said. When the debate’s moderator, Jane Waldfogel, informed him that the most recent data showed that the race gap had begun to close again, Murray seemed unimpressed, as if the possibility that blacks could ever make further progress was inconceivable.Flynn took a different approach. The black-white gap, he pointed out, differs dramatically by age. He noted that the tests we have for measuring the cognitive functioning of infants, though admittedly crude, show the races to be almost the same. By age four, the average black I.Q. is 95.4—only four and a half points behind the average white I.Q. Then the real gap emerges: from age four through twenty-four, blacks lose six-tenths of a point a year, until their scores settle at 83.4.That steady decline, Flynn said, did not resemble the usual pattern of genetic influence. Instead, it was exactly what you would expect, given the disparate cognitive environments that whites and blacks encounter as they grow older. Black children are more likely to be raised in single-parent homes than are white children—and single-parent homes are less cognitively complex than two-parent homes. The average I.Q. of first-grade students in schools that blacks attend is 95, which means that “kids who want to be above average don’t have to aim as high.” There were possibly adverse differences between black teen-age culture and white teen-age culture, and an enormous number of young black men are in jail—which is hardly the kind of environment in which someone would learn to put on scientific spectacles.Flynn then talked about what we’ve learned from studies of adoption and mixed-race children—and that evidence didn’t fit a genetic model, either. If I.Q. is innate, it shouldn’t make a difference whether it’s a mixed-race child’s mother or father who is black. But it does: children with a white mother and a black father have an eight-point I.Q. advantage over those with a black mother and a white father. And it shouldn’t make much of a difference where a mixed-race child is born. But, again, it does: the children fathered by black American G.I.s in postwar Germany and brought up by their German mothers have the same I.Q.s as the children of white American G.I.s and German mothers. The difference, in that case, was not the fact of the children’s blackness, as a fundamentalist would say. It was the fact of their Germanness—of their being brought up in a different culture, under different circumstances. “The mind is much more like a muscle than we’ve ever realized,” Flynn said. “It needs to get cognitive exercise. It’s not some piece of clay on which you put an indelible mark.” The lesson to be drawn from black and white differences was the same as the lesson from the Netherlands years ago: I.Q. measures not just the quality of a person’s mind but the quality of the world that person lives in. ♦

CORRECTION: In his December 17th piece, “None of the Above,” Malcolm Gladwell states that Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in their 1994 book “The Bell Curve,” proposed that Americans with low I.Q.s be “sequestered in a ‘high-tech’ version of an Indian reservation.” In fact, Herrnstein and Murray deplored the prospect of such “custodialism” and recommended that steps be taken to avert it. We regret the error.

There is a good chance that an odd cluster of hereditary neurological diseases among the Ashkenazi Jews is a side-effect of strong selection for increased intelligence. The idea is not really new, but the evidence has gotten stronger with time, and I have recently found some intriguing supporting data.. Four of these syndromes - Tay-Sachs, Niemann-Pick, Gaucher's, and mucolipidosis type IV - are recessive lysosomal storage diseases. The first three of these are caused by deficient variants of enzymes that break down sphingolipids, which play a role in neuron membrane structure and also as signaling molecules. Homozygotes, who have no working copy of the breakdown enzymes, become ill. Tay-Sachs and Niemann-Pick cause retardation and death in childhood, but Gaucher's disease is milder and more variable. The form common in Ashkenazi Jews does not cause brain damage, although there can be other problems with the spleen and bones. . Mucolipidosis type IV probably involves a defect in endocytosis. It causes retardation and death in early life.

Canavan disease is caused by mutations in the aspartoacylase gene. It is the only known genetic disorder caused by a defect in the metabolism of a small metabolite, N-acetyl-L-aspartic acid, synthesized exclusively in the brain in a cell-specific manner. It too is fatal in early life.

Familial dysautonomia is a recessive disease that results in abnormalities of the sensory and autonomic nervous systems. It does not cause retardation, but greatly shortens life.

Torsion dystonia is caused by a dominant gene with low penetrance.. The symptoms involve inappropriate contractions of muscles. In a mild case, that might mean a tendency to writer's cramp: in a severe case, it means uncontrollable contractions that leave your limbs twisted and useless. About 30% of the individuals with this gene have some noticeable symptoms, about 10% have very serious symptoms that can leave them in a wheel chair. The problem is not in the muscles, but in areas of the brain that control muscles. Torsion dystonia does not cause retardation... not hardly.

Each of these hereditary neurological diseases is more common among the Ashkenazi than in any other group, and in several of these syndromes, the great majority of all cases are found among the Ashkenazi, who make up less than 0.2% of the human race. ~4% of the Ashkenazi are carriers for Tay-Sachs, about 1% are carriers for Niemann-Pick, ~5% carry a Gaucher mutation, ~1% carry a mutation for mucolipidosis type IV, ~2% carry a Canavan mutation, ~3% carry the familial dysautonomia gene, and about 0.03% have the dominant torsion dystonia mutation. Altogether about 16% of Ashkenazi Jews carry one of these mutations.

Rare genetic diseases can become common in a group by chance, especially if that group does not mix much with others and if it has recently expanded from a small founding population.. Both of those conditions existed among the Ashkenazi, but that explanation probably does not work in this case, because for most of these diseases, more than one mutation of the same gene has become common in this population. That is the case for Tay-Sachs, Niemann-Pick, Gaucher's disease, mucolipidosis type IV, and Canavan disease. Only torsion dystonia and familial dysautonomia are caused by lone mutations. It would be incredibly unlikely for chance to greatly elevate the frequency of two or more mutations of the same gene. It would be even less likely to do this repeatedly in genes involved in closely related metabolic pathways. So somehow, natural selection, rather than chance, must have favored these mutations. If mutations that affect a particular organ or function give a reproductive edge in some environment, they can become common, even if they cause disease in double dose. The most famous example of this is the sickle cell mutation, which gives heterozygotes good protection against falciparum malaria and causes very serious problems in homozygotes. We know of a number of other malaria-protective mutations besides sickle-cell affecting red cells; Hemoglobin C, Hemoglobin E, G6PD deficiency, alpha- and beta- thalassemia, and Melanesian ovalocytosis. The malaria resistance mutations involve multiple common mutations of the same gene, and multiple mutations of closely related genes that affect the same physiological system - in this case the red cell. Among the Ashkenazi we find the same pattern, only the system affected is the central nervous system. Jared Diamond and others have suggested that these Ashkenazi hereditary neurological diseases might have given protection against tuberculosis, but this seems unlikely. These mutations are not common in other adjacent ethnic groups, and they modify molecules whose primary function is in the central nervous system. In some cases, such as Canavan disease, they are only found in the brain.

So a change in brain function, as the source of the fitness advantage in heterozygotes carrying these mutations, is the way to bet. That notion is not just based on this genetic and biochemical evidence: we start out already knowing that Ashkenazi Jews have a higher average IQ than any other group, something like 110-115. What, other than natural selection, could cause this? We also know that for a long time they lived under very unusual conditions, conditions very favorable to this kind of evolutionary change. They had a very different job mix from their neighbors: none of them were farmers ('Scribe, banker, jeweler, shopkeeper'), and they almost never intermarried.

Some new evidence - new to me, anyhow - strengthens the case. It turns out that GM2-ganglioside, which accumulates in Tay-Sachs and Niemann-Pick patients, is a signal for dendrite growth. In homozygotes it causes inappropriate dendrite growth neurons. In heterozygotes, GM2-ganglioside levels would only be slightly elevated and might favor moderately increased dendrite growth - which might increase IQ. The build-up product in Gaucher's disease seems to caused increased axonal growth.

The story in torsion dystonia is more obvious Unlike most genetic diseases, it is dominant. You only need one copy of the mutant gene to have problems. That also means that any benefit must be large. When a recessive mutation is rare, there are many more carriers than homozygotes, and even a small advantage among heterozygotes can balance serious bad effects in the rare homozygtes. A dominant has to give a hefty advantage, even more so if it has any costs, which the torsion dystonia gene surely does. So if torsion dystonia is part of this Ashkenazi pattern of hereditary neurological disease and pays off in IQ, it must make a big difference, and that difference will probably show up in patients. ( Note that in diseases like Tay-Sachs, nobody even studies carriers. Doctors are not geneticists.) Apparently it does. I found several reports of materially increased IQ among Ashkenazi torsion dystonia patients. . The difference is apparently so striking that it is mentioned in the very first scientific article on the disease, by Flatau back in 1911. Many other physicians made the same observation. And if you think that plenty that being crippled makes you smarter, think again: nobody every said that about polio victims. Roswell Eldridge, in a small group of patients, found that the average IQ was 122, 10 points higher than their controls matched for age, sex, ethnic background, and school. . The same mutation has been seen elsewhere, but is very rare. In this group the payoff outweighed the trouble, while in every other human group it did not. We have found the gene (in 1997), which codes for an ATP-binding protein, but as yet I don't believe that we know exactly how it causes trouble or what it does normally. But I'll hazard a guess: the change accelerates some brain system tied to cognitive functioning - nearly redlines it, leaves it vulnerable to common insults in a way that can cause spectacular trouble. You might compare to overclocking a chip. Sometimes you get away with it, sometimes you don't.

More generally, if this is what I think it is, all these Ashkenazi neurological diseases are hints of ways in which one could supercharge intelligence. One, by increasing dendrite growth: two, by fooling with myelin: three, something else, whatever is happening in torsion dystonia. In some cases the difference is probably an aspect of development, not something you can turn on and off. In other cases, the effect might exist when the chemical influence is acting and disappear when the influence does. In either case, it seems likely that we could - if we wanted to - developed pharmaceutical agents that had similar effects. The first kind, those affecting development, would be something that might have to be administered early in life, maybe before birth. while the second kind would be 'smart pills' that one could pop as desired or as needed. Of course, we have to hope that we can find ways of improving safety. Would you take a pill that increased your IQ by 10 or 15 points that also had a 10% chance of putting you in a wheel chair?

Mrs. Clinton Smears IkeHow desperate is Hillary Clinton in the face of the Obama juggernaut? So desperate that she is smearing a genuine war hero. And we seem to be the first to notice it.

The Politico's Ben Smith set off a bit of a kerfuffle yesterday when he noted that Mrs. Clinton, in an interview with Fox News's Major Garrett, seemed to be likening front-runner Barack Obama to Martin Luther King, and not in a good way:

[Mrs.] Clinton rejoined the running argument over hope and "false hope" in an interview in Dover this afternoon, reminding Fox's Major Garrett that while Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on behalf of civil rights, President Lyndon Johnson was the one who got the legislation passed. . . .

"Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act," Clinton said. "It took a president to get it done."

Josh Marshall weighed in with a halfhearted defense of Mrs. Clinton. He quotes her at length:

"I would, and I would point to the fact that that Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the President before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done. That dream became a reality, the power of that dream became real in people's lives because we had a president who said we are going to do it, and actually got it accomplished."

"It's an ambiguous statement," Marshall allows. "But her reference is to different presidents--Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, one of whom inspired but did relatively little legislatively and Johnson who did a lot legislatively, though he was rather less than inspiring. Quite apart from the merits of Obama and Clinton, it's not a bad point about Kennedy and LBJ."

Smith then defended his interpretation. What both of them missed was that passing mention about the Civil Rights Act being something "the president before had not even tried." In context, it is clear that this is a reference to the president before Kennedy--that is, Dwight Eisenhower--not to Kennedy himself, who did in fact propose civil rights legislation in 1963 but died before Congress could pass it.

This, however, is a smear against Ike, who was a much better civil-rights president than he typically gets credit for. As Bruce Bartlett explains in "Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past" (available from the OpinionJournal bookstore):

In his January 10, 1957, State of the Union Address, Eisenhower renewed his request for civil rights legislation, which had passed the House but died in the Senate in the previous Congress due to Southern Democratic delaying tactics. . . .

Everyone knew that the critical fight on the civil rights bill would be in the Senate. . . . In that body, the key figure was Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who represented the [former] Confederate state of Texas and had been installed in his position by Southern Democrats precisely in order to block civil rights legislation. Until the 1950s, Johnson's record of opposition to all civil rights legislation was spotless. But he was ambitious and wanted to be president. . . .

After dragging his feet on the civil rights bill throughout much of 1957, Johnson finally came to the conclusion that the tide had turned in favor of civil rights and he needed to be on the right side of the issue if he hoped to become president. . . .

At the same time, the Senate's master tactician and principal opponent of the civil rights bill, Democrat Richard B. Russell of Georgia, saw the same handwriting on the wall but came to a different conclusion. He realized that the support was no longer there for an old-fashioned Democrat filibuster. . . . So Russell adopted a different strategy this time of trying to amend the civil rights bill so as to minimize its impact. Behind the scenes, Johnson went along with Russell's strategy of not killing the civil rights bill, but trying to neuter it as much as possible. . . .

Eisenhower was disappointed at not being able to produce a better piece of legislation. "I wanted a much stronger civil rights bill in '57 than I could get," he later lamented. "But the Democrats . . . wouldn't let me have it."

Liberals criticized Eisenhower for getting such a modest bill at the end of the day. But Johnson argued that it was historically important because it was the first civil rights bill to pass Congress since 1875. "Once you break virginity," he said, "it'll be easier next time."

To put it mildly, LBJ was not a consistent advocate of racial equality. Bartlett (both in his book and in this article) quotes LBJ's explanation of why he backed the Civil Rights Act of 1957:

"These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don't move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there'll be no way of stopping them, we'll lose the filibuster and there'll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It'll be Reconstruction all over again."

You can see where Mrs. Clinton, with her finger-to-the-wind approach to some of today's most pressing issues, might feel a certain kinship with LBJ. On the other hand, it's not at all clear that LBJ's presidency was a necessary condition for the passage of the Civil Rights Act. If Richard Nixon, Eisenhower's vice president, had won the 1960 election and LBJ had remained in the Senate as majority leader, it's easy to imagine the latter--with an eye toward the presidency in 1964 or '68--shepherding the Civil Rights Act through the Senate and the former signing it.

LBJ was, after all, a very effective legislator. Can the same be said of New York's junior senator? Oddly, Mrs. Clinton has chosen to compare herself to a deeply flawed president. Odder still, the comparison ends up underscoring her failure to measure up.

The Color of CharityFebruary 4, 2008; Page A14Just when we thought we'd heard everything from the diversity police, here they come trying to prescribe even the color of charity. The California Assembly last week passed a bill sponsored by state Representative Joe Coto to require foundations with assets of more than $250 million to disclose the race, gender and sexual orientation of their trustees, staff, and even grantees. Look for this to arrive in a legislature near you.

A Berkeley-based advocacy group called the Greenlining Institute hatched this idea because, allegedly, racial minorities aren't well enough represented in California policy debates. John Gamboa, Greenlining's executive director, blames foundations for failing to donate enough money to "minority-led" think tanks and community groups and businesses, and he hopes this legislation will "shame" them into giving more. What counts as a minority-led organization? According to Greenlining, the board and staff should both be more than 50% minority.

This certainly takes the spoils system of racial preferences to a whole new level. Heretofore the government has tried to enforce a pigmentation principle in government jobs and contracts, and in private employment through the threat of lawsuits. But this is about telling private citizens how to give their own money away.

Mr. Gamboa says these philanthropies have tax-exempt status, so the public has a right to this information. "Minorities are paying a little more in taxes but are not receiving their fair share of benefits," he says. This seems an odd claim, since so much private charity is targeted explicitly at minorities. But it makes sense once you understand that what he means is that not enough of this cash is channelled through certain minority-run activist groups, such as, well, his own. It's no accident that such ethnic lobbies as the Black Business Association and the Centro Legal de la Raza also love this idea.

There's also the little problem of accountability and donor intent. Private citizens typically establish foundations with specific charitable goals in mind -- such as wetlands conservation, or medical research, or even promoting free market ideas. If donors are suddenly supposed to allocate grants by the color or sexual lifestyle of the grantee, that donor intent will be distorted at the very least. Presumably we want money for cancer research to support the most promising research ideas, not to be based on whether the labs have a rainbow coalition of Ph.Ds. The goal is to cure cancer.

Paul Brest is a former NAACP attorney and president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, California's largest foundation. And in a letter to the state Assembly on Mr. Coto's proposal, he put it this way: "[Our] fundamental operating principle is to direct our resources to organizations that have the promise of making the greatest difference in achieving [our philanthropic] goals. Thus, we do not focus on the racial composition of our grantees, but rather on how to achieve measurable impact in improving the lives of the communities that our grant recipients serve."

Lest you think this idea is too wacky to go anywhere, it is also expected to pass the California Senate and could soon land on Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's desk. The Greenlining staff is already lobbying House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel for Congressional hearings. Foundations and charities that don't want to start apportioning their donations by skin color, or between gays and heterosexuals, had better start describing this idea as the political shakedown it is.

If Senator John McCain needed to prove that he is a real Republican, he did it when he continued an old Republican tradition of utterly inept attempts to appeal to black voters.

Senator McCain was booed at a recent memorial on the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. In typical Republican fashion, he tried to apologize but the audience was not buying it and let him know it.

Why would Senator McCain choose a venue where his rejection was virtually guaranteed? Not only did he not get his message out, the message that came out through the media is that this black audience rejected him, which is readily portrayed as if blacks in general rejected him.

The Republican strategy for making inroads into the black vote has failed consistently for more than a quarter of a century. Yet it never seems to occur to them to change their approach.

The first thing that they do that is foredoomed to failure is trying to reach blacks through the civil rights organizations and other institutions of the black establishment. The second proven loser is trying to appeal to blacks by offering the same kinds of things that Democrats offer-- token honors, politically correct rhetoric and welfare state benefits.

Blacks who want those things know that they can already get them from the Democrats. Why should they listen to Republicans who act like imitation Democrats?'

These are not the blacks whose votes Republicans have any realistic hope of getting. Nor do the Republicans need the votes of all blacks. If just 20 percent of blacks begin voting Republican, the Democrats are lost.

The question then is how to have a shot at getting the votes of those blacks who are not in thrall to the current black "leaders" and who on many issues may be conservative.

First of all, you don't get their votes by approaching them from the left, when that is neither their orientation nor yours. Issuing stamps honoring Paul Robeson and Kwanzaa are not the way to reach those blacks whom Republicans have any realistic chance of reaching.

Trying to reach blacks through civil rights organizations that are totally hostile to your message is like a quarterback trying to throw a pass to a receiver surrounded by opposing defenders. That just leads to a lot of interceptions and touchdowns for the other team.

That is essentially what has been happening to the Republicans, as far as the black vote is concerned, for decades on end. Someone once said that a method which fails repeatedly may possibly be wrong.

The truth is something that can attract people's attention, if only for its novelty in politics. There is no need for Republicans to try to pose as saviors of blacks. Democrats do that and they have more experience doing it.

A sober presentation of the facts-- "straight talk," if you will-- gives Senator McCain and Republicans their best shot at a larger share of the votes of blacks. There is plenty to talk straight about, including all the things that the Democrats are committed to that work to the disadvantage of blacks, beginning with Democrats' adamant support of teachers' unions in their opposition to parental choice through vouchers.

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The teachers' unions are just one of the sacred cow constituencies of the Democratic Party whose agendas are very harmful to blacks.

Black voters also need to be told about the tens of thousands of blacks who have been forced out of a number of liberal Democratic California counties by skyrocketing housing prices, brought on by Democratic environmentalists' severe restrictions on the building of homes or apartments.

The black population of San Francisco, for example, has been cut in half since 1970-- and San Francisco is the very model of a community of liberal Democrats, including green zealots who are heedless of the consequences of their actions on others.

Then there are the effects of tort lawyers in raising prices, liberal judges turning criminals loose and other influential Democratic Party constituencies whose effects on blacks are strictly negative.

Where should these and other messages be delivered to blacks, if not through the existing black organizations?

That message can be delivered as part of televised speeches addressing other major issues facing the country. It can be delivered as part of advertisements in the general media and separately in advertisements in newspapers, magazines and television programs with a black audience.

Logistics are not the problem. Insistence on following a repeatedly failed game plan is.

WARREN, Mich. -- Stan Sheyn, a white student who attends community college in this working-class Detroit suburb, supports Barack Obama for president. But he has no time for what he calls "double standards and propagation of victim mentality."

"The fact that a black man can run for the position of the President of the United States of America only corroborates that there is enough opportunity and equality for great things like that to happen," he says. "And that there is no need to create special advantages for any demographic group."

WSJ.COM FORUM

U.S. perceptions of race have changed considerably over the last half century. As a result, do you think race is over-emphasized or under-emphasized in the U.S. today? Do we still look closely at another person's race, or are we in an age where race matters less than it once did? And do you think affirmative action should continue to have a future in the U.S.? Share your thoughts.Electra Fulbright, a black small-business consultant in prosperous Southfield, Mich., couldn't disagree more.

"Obama's privileges and his accomplishments are minute compared to the black population at large," says Ms. Fulbright, who plans to vote for Sen. Obama. "When we talk about Obama, we are not talking about the average black American. There is injustice in this country, and until we correct it, we need affirmative action."

Few issues have been as incendiary in the workplace and on college campuses as affirmative action -- in large part because so many blacks and whites have been personally affected by affirmative action, in ways both good and bad.

Now, Sen. Obama's rise is prompting some whites to ask -- and some blacks to fear -- the question: Does America still need affirmative action, given that an African-American has made it to the top of American politics?

The question has been asked before, as other blacks have risen to high positions. But Sen. Obama's swift ascent to the verge of the presidency may have created a turning point in the debate.

Associated Press Affirmative action has stirred controversy for decades, including this 2002 protest. The issue of affirmative action is likely to dog Sen. Obama on the campaign trail as he seeks to win over white blue-collar voters in battleground states like Michigan. For many of these voters, affirmative action has been divisive since the 1970s. Ward Connerly, a prominent affirmative-action opponent, is seeking to place anti-affirmative action referendums on the ballot in Arizona, Nebraska and Colorado. Voters would be asked to ban "preferential treatment" of women and minorities in state university admissions, the filling of state-funded jobs and awarding of state contracts.

Favoring the Middle Class

White anger over affirmative action has diminished as the Supreme Court has systematically narrowed the scope of programs in colleges and the workplace. Still, the gap between black and white opinion remains wide.

More than half of blacks -- 57% -- say the country should make "every effort to improve the position of blacks and minorities, even if it means giving preferential treatment," according to a poll conducted last year by the Pew Research Center, a non-partisan Washington think tank that studies social attitudes. Just 27% of whites agree with that view. The same poll shows that nearly half of whites -- 48% -- believe the U.S. has "gone too far in pushing equal rights in this country." Far fewer African Americans -- 27% -- agree.

Opinions about affirmative action vary depending on how researchers word their questions; support tends to grow, for example, when the question describes the programs in more detail. But the Gallup polling firm says that regardless of the wording, all of its surveys on affirmative action show blacks overwhelmingly support it, while whites tend to be much more divided.

Sen. Obama's success has also stirred an uncomfortable debate within the black community over who has reaped the gains of affirmative action. Some argue the policies skew toward middle-class blacks instead of poor blacks, and have favored too many individuals like Sen. Obama -- people with a biracial background or the children of African and Caribbean immigrants, as opposed to blacks born in the U.S.

In a 2000 interview with the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, Sen. Obama, then an Illinois state senator, said: "I have no way of knowing if I was a beneficiary of affirmative action either in my admission to Harvard or my initial election to the [Harvard Law] Review. If I was, then I am certainly not ashamed of the fact, for I would argue that affirmative action is important precisely because those who benefit typically rise to the challenge when given an opportunity."

Sen. Obama's newfound prominence has also prompted some successful blacks to wonder whether his achievements, and theirs, mean affirmative action should be modified to help poor and working-class whites.

"You have this traditional assumption that whites have made it and have it all -- that 'because I am black, I am disadvantaged,' and 'because I am white, I am advantaged,' " says Rev. Carlyle Stewart, who holds degrees from the University of Chicago and Northwestern and heads a large middle-class black church in Southfield, a short drive from Warren. "It may be time to broaden that discussion."

Sen. Obama "believes that no one can deny that our country has made tremendous progress in the past 50 years," said campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor in a statement. "But the suggestion that somehow Senator Obama's campaign represents an easy shortcut to racial reconciliation is just not realistic." He said Sen. Obama believes "affirmative action in universities today is appropriate only if race is one of many factors. The Supreme Court has made that clear."

Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain opposes "affirmative action plans and quotas that give weight to one group of Americans at the expense of another," says McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds. "Plans that result in quotas, where such plans have not been judicially created to remedy a specific, proven act of discrimination, only result in more discrimination and violate the concept of equality of opportunity."

Early Challenges

Affirmative action began in 1961, when President Kennedy issued an executive order declaring that federal contractors should "take affirmative action" to integrate their work forces.

The initiative broadened to include policies that favored women and minorities in hiring and promotion at work and in college admissions, the goal being to overcome past discrimination.

Many whites charged that this amounted to "reverse discrimination." In the landmark Bakke case of 1978, the Supreme Court narrowed the definition of affirmative action, declaring unconstitutional the use of some rigid quota systems. But it upheld the principle of affirmative action.

In 2003, a more-conservative Supreme Court again upheld the principle of affirmative action, but narrowed the interpretation still further, adding in a majority opinion, "We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary." Opponents of affirmative action recently filed another suit challenging affirmative action in Texas.

Many economists and sociologists agree that affirmative-action programs have helped spur the growth of the black middle and upper classes, defined as households making more than $40,000 a year. Today, this group accounts for about 40% of black households, up from about 25% in 1970, according to U.S. Census figures. During that same period, the percentage of white households in the middle class and above has risen to about 60%, from just under 50%.

Affirmative action policies have helped blacks gain access to large corporations and top universities, studies have shown, and the presence of blacks in these places has encouraged others to follow. The number of African Americans at the country's top 50 colleges and universities has doubled in recent decades, according to Harry Holzer, a Georgetown University economist. Women have benefited, too, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, when they began breaking into traditionally male-dominated fields.

A Leg Up for Whites

Michigan's Macomb County is home to many of the fabled "Reagan Democrats," the conservative working-class whites who left the Democratic Party largely over social issues including race in the 1980s. Here, life has been changed by affirmative action and the rise of the black middle class. In the past five years, the African-American population has doubled to about 6% from about 3%, in part as blacks have left Detroit for safer suburbs with better schools.

ROAD TO EQUALITY

Associated Press Allan Bakke graduates from the U.C. Davis medical school after a Supreme Court ruling granted him admission in 1978

Key Events Involving Affirmative Action:1961: President John F. Kennedy signs an executive order that instructs federal contractors to take 'affirmative action' to ensure against discrimination1964: Civil Rights Act prohibits race-based discrimination by large employers. The Act forms the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a driving force in affirmative-action policies1965: President Lyndon B. Johnson issues an order requiring federal contractors to expand job opportunities for minorities1971: President Richard M. Nixon issues an executive order directing federal agencies to develop specific program goals for national Minority Business Enterprise contracting program1978: The Supreme Court rules in favor of a white man who was denied admission to medical school. The opinion upholds the use of race in choosing among qualified applicants but rules that inflexible quotas are unconstitutional1986: The Supreme Court upholds a judicially ordered 29% minority 'membership admission goal' for a union that had intentionally discriminated against minorities1995: President Bill Clinton asserts that affirmative action is still needed but calls for elimination of any federal program that creates quotasSuch changes make some whites here wonder why affirmative action is needed at all. "If blacks are living in the same houses that I am living in, and they can afford the same things I can afford, why shouldn't I have the same breaks as they do?" says Tony Licata, a professional photographer in Macomb County who is white and says he is leaning toward voting for Sen. McCain.

"Race should not be the deciding point about who gets what," says Jessalin Horne, a white working-class college student who plans to vote for Sen. Obama in the fall.

In conversations, many white blue-collar and middle-class workers in Macomb County said they blame competition from China, India and elsewhere for their job losses, not competition from blacks. But the economic battering that many poor and working-class whites have taken as Michigan's auto industry has shrunk makes some whites feel that it's their turn for a leg up.

"I have been a supporter of affirmative action, but it needs to be refocused -- other groups need to be included," says Marceia Lugo, a divorced white mother of three whose mother and ex-husband have left Michigan to look for work. Ms. Lugo says she backed Sen. Clinton but will now vote for Sen. Obama. "I am not black, so I don't know those issues. But I have been poor, and I have had to struggle, so I should get special treatment."

Wooed by Elite Colleges

A half-hour drive from Warren lies Southfield, Mich., a leafy, integrated middle-class and upper-middle-class suburb that is a testament to the impact of affirmative action. Barbara Talley, now a retired financial analyst and a Southfield resident, became one of the first black owners of a KFC franchise in the 1980s, after Rev. Jesse Jackson lobbied the company to sell more franchises to African Americans. Wanda Cook-Robinson, Southfield's black school superintendent, has been the first black in several teaching and administrative positions at area schools. "That wouldn't have happened without affirmative action," says Ms. Cook-Robinson.

Many blacks here don't want to lose the boost that they say affirmative action gives them. Stephen Kemp, a successful black funeral director in Southfield, sends his son to a $24,000-a-year private high school. His son, a junior, has been receiving letters from elite colleges wooing him to apply. "When they look at his application they see he is an African-American male -- he has so much opportunity," says Mr. Kemp, who himself attended the University of Michigan. "Brown called him yesterday."

Associated Press President Lyndon B. Johnson turns to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the signing of the Civil Rights Act Mr. Kemp thinks it is fine that his son gets special attention, because diversity on campus benefits whites as well as blacks. "If you are getting a true education, that has to reflect all kinds of people," he says.

The election, especially Sen. Obama's success in winning white voters, has Mary Donaldson thinking that affirmative action is likely to fade away in coming years as the country continues to change. "My son is 9 years old. Just because he is black, he can't think he's going to get special treatment," says Ms. Donaldson, who works at a pre-school in Southfield and supports Sen. Obama. "I don't want him to totally depend on something like that."

Twyla Griffin, who works for a health-care company and attends church in Southfield, says she thinks bias lives on. "It's fear -- 'this black boy is going to take my little white Johnny's job,' " says Ms. Griffin. Affirmative action, she says, simply levels a still-tilted playing field.

"It would be great if Obama made all the decisions for us, but there are a lot of people who still have decision-making power who are still a little prejudiced," says Marilyn Hobbs, an intellectual-property manager who supports Sen. Obama

James Jackson, a black banker and another Obama supporter, nods in agreement. He says he doesn't put his photograph on his business card like many of his white colleagues, because he thinks it will discourage white customers. "Race is a real issue still, no matter what happens in November," he says.

In 1922, former President and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court William Howard Taft selected Robert Russa Moton to give the chief address at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial. At the time, many considered Moton to be the most powerful African American in the country. In elite, white political and financial circles, his status was unparalleled.

In race relations, Moton advocated accommodation, not confrontation. He firmly believed that the best way to advance the cause of African Americans was to convince white people of black people's worth through their exemplary behavior. Never one to rock the boat, he didn't fight segregation or challenge white authority.

A protégé of Booker T. Washington, Moton had succeeded him as principal of Tuskegee Institute. From this position, Moton worked long and hard to win the trust of white politicians and philanthropists and secure donations for Tuskegee and other African American institutions and organizations.

His power in the country stemmed from the money he could raise from whites who appreciated his conservative views and methods. In addition to his access to leaders in Washington, Moton sat on the boards of major philanthropic organizations with the likes of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller Jr., and his influence was considerable. When Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, provided the funding to build more than 6,000 "Rosenwald" schools for rural Southern African Americans, Moton's skills were clearly in play behind the scenes.

Over the years, Moton's words and deeds impressed Herbert Hoover, who invited Moton to visit him anytime he was in Washington. However, during the Great Flood of 1927, it was Hoover who found himself calling on Moton for assistance. Secretary of Commerce during the Coolidge administration, Hoover had his eye on the presidency. When President Coolidge placed Hoover in command of all flood relief operations during the disaster, it seemed to be the perfect vehicle to raise his national profile and revive his reputation as the "Great Humanitarian."

Drawing on lessons he had learned feeding the starving European victims of World War I, Hoover swept into action. He cut through bureaucratic red tape, got aid to victims devastated by the flood and was dubbed a hero by the national press. There was only one thing that could tarnish Hoover's glowing image -- the treatment of African Americans in the Washington County levee camps. Hoover had visited the area and had approved the local flood relief committee's decision, under the leadership of Will Percy, to keep the African American refugees on the levee. But as conditions deteriorated in the camps, word slowly filtered North, and the scandal threatened to derail Hoover's presidential ambitions.

Hoover's friends urged him to get what they called "the big Negroes" in the Republican Party to quiet his critics, and Hoover turned to Robert Moton for the job. Hoover formed the Colored Advisory Commission, led by Moton and staffed by prominent African Americans, to investigate the allegations of abuses in the flood area.

The commission conducted a thorough investigation and reported back to Moton on the deplorable conditions. Moton presented the findings to Hoover, and advocated immediate improvements to aid the flood's neediest victims. But the information was never made public. Hoover had asked Moton to keep a tight lid on his investigation. In return, Hoover implied that if he were successful in his bid for the presidency, Moton and his people would play a role in his administration unprecedented in the nation's history. Hoover also hinted that as president he intended to divide the land of bankrupt planters into small African American-owned farms.

Motivated by Hoover's promises, Moton saw to it that the Colored Advisory Commission never revealed the full extent of the abuses in the Delta, and Moton championed Hoover's candidacy to the African American population. However, once elected President in 1928, Hoover ignored Robert Moton and the promises he had made to his black constituency. In the following election of 1932, Moton withdrew his support for Hoover and switched to the Democratic Party. In an historic shift, African Americans began to abandon the Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, and turned to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Democratic Party instead.

The essay below was written by a Vietnamese immigrant, a fellow with a most unusual name. Kaitz currently teaches philosophy at the University of San Francisco.

Obama's Anger

By Ed Kaitz"The anger is real. It is powerful, and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races."- Barack Obama

Back in the late 1980's I was on a plane flying out of New Orleans and sitting next to me was a rather interesting and, according to Barack Obama, unusual black man. Friendly, gregarious, and wise beyond his years, we immediately hit it off. I had been working on Vietnamese commercial fishing boats for a few years based in southern Louisiana the boats were owned by the recent wave of Vietnamese refugees who flooded into the familiar tropical environment after the war. Floating in calm seas out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, I would hear tearful songs and tales from ex-paratroopers about losing brothers, sisters, parents, children, lovers, and beautiful Vietnam itself to the communists.

In Bayou country I lived on boats and in doublewide trailers, and like the rest of the Vietnamese refugees, I shopped at Wal-Mart and ate a lot of rice. When they arrived in Louisiana the refugees had no money (the money that they had was used to bribe their way out of Vietnam and into refugee camps in Thailand), few friends, and a mostly unfriendly and suspicious local population.

They did however have strong families, a strong work ethic, and the "Audacity of Hope. "Within a generation, with little or no knowledge of English, the Vietnamese had achieved dominance in the fishing industry there and their children were already achieving the top SAT scores in the state.

While I had been fishing my new black friend had been working as a prison psychologist in Missouri , and he was pursuing a higher degree in psychology. He was interested in my story, and after about an hour getting to know each other I asked him point blank why these Vietnamese refugees, with no money, friends, or knowledge of the language could be, within a generation, so successful. I also asked him why it was so difficult to convince young black men to abandon the streets and take advantage of the same kinds of opportunities that the Vietnamese had recently embraced.

His answer, only a few words, not only floored me but became sort of a razor that has allowed me ever since to slice through all of the rhetoric regarding race relations that Democrats shovel our way during election season: "We're owed and they aren't." In short, he concluded, "they're hungry and we think we're owed. It's crushing us, and as long as we think we're owed we're going nowhere."

A good test case for this theory is Katrina. Obama, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and assorted white apologists continue to express anger and outrage over the federal response to the Katrina disaster. But where were the Vietnamese "leaders" expressing their "anger?" The Vietnamese comprise a substantial part of the New Orleans population, and yet is absent any report claiming that the Vietnamese were "owed" anything. This is not to say that the federal response was an adequate one, but we need to take this as a sign that maybe the problem has very little to do with racism and a lot to with a mindset.The mindset that one is "owed" something in life has not only affected black mobility in business but black mobility in education as well. Remember Ward Churchill? About fifteen years ago he was my boss. After leaving the fishing boats, I attended graduate school at the University of Colorado at Boulder I managed to get a job on campus teaching expository writing to minority students who had been accepted provisionally into the university on an affirmative action program. And although I never met him, Ward Churchill, in addition to teaching in the ethnic studies department, helped to develop and organize the minority writing program.

The job paid most of my bills, but what I witnessed there was absolutely horrifying. The students were encouraged to write essays attacking the white establishment from every conceivable angle and in addition to defend affirmative action and other government programs. Of the hundreds of papers that I read, there was not one original contribution to the problem of black mobility that strayed from the party line.

The irony of it all however is that the "white establishment" managed to get them into the college and pay their entire tuition. Instead of being encouraged to study international affairs, classical or modern languages, philosophy or art, most of these students became ethnic studies or sociology majors because it allowed them to remain in disciplines whose orientation justified their existence at the university. In short, it became a vicious cycle.

There was a student there I'll never forget. He was plucked out of the projects in Denver and given a free ride to the university. One day in my office he told me that his mother had said the following to him: "M. J., they owe you this. White people at that university owe you this." M. J's experience at the university was a glorious fulfillment of his mother's angst.

There were black student organizations and other clubs that "facilitated" the minority student's experience on the majority white and "racist" campus, in addition to a plethora of faculty members, both white and black, who encouraged the same animus toward the white establishment. While adding to their own bona fides as part of the trendy Left, these "facilitators" supplied M. J. with everything he needed to quench his and his mother's anger, but nothing in the way of advice about how to succeed in college. No one, in short, had told M. J. that he needed to study. But since he was "owed" everything, why put out any effort on his own?

In a fit of despair after failing most of his classes, M. J. wandered into my office one Friday afternoon in the middle of the semester and asked if I could help him out. I asked M. J. about his plans that evening, and he told me that he usually attended parties on Friday and Saturday nights. I told him that if he agreed to meet me in front of the university library at 6:00 PM I would buy him dinner. At 6PM M. J. showed up, and for the next twenty minutes we wandered silently through the stacks, lounges, and study areas of the library. When we arrived back at the entrance I asked M. J. if he noticed anything interesting. As we headed up the hill to a popular burger joint, M. J. turned to me and said:"They were all Asian. Everyone in there was Asian, and it was Friday night."

Nothing I could do, say, or show him, however, could match the fire power of his support system favoring anger. I was sad to hear of M. J. dropping out of school the following semester.

During my time teaching in the writing program, I watched Asians get transformed via leftist doublespeak from "minorities" to "model minorities" to "they're not minorities" in precise rhythm to their fortunes in business and education. Asians were "minorities" when they were struggling in this country, but they became "model minorities" when they achieved success. Keep in mind "model minority" did not mean what most of us think it means, i.e., something to emulate. "Model minority" meant that Asians had certain cultural advantages, such as a strong family tradition and a culture of scholarship that the black community lacked.

To suggest that intact families and a philosophy of self-reliance could be the ticket to success would have undermined the entire angst establishment. Because of this, it was improper to use Asian success as a model. The contortions the left exercised in order to defend this ridiculous thesis helped to pave the way for the elimination of Asians altogether from the status of "minority."This whole process took only a few years.

Eric Hoffer said:"...you do not win the weak by sharing your wealth with them; it will but infect them with greed and resentment. You can win the weak only by sharing your pride, hope or hatred with them."

We now know that Barack Obama really has no interest in the "audacity of hope." With his race speech, Obama became a peddler of angst, resentment and despair. Too bad he doesn't direct that angst at the liberal establishment that has sold black people a bill of goods since the 1960's. What Obama seems angry about is America itself and what it stands for; the same America that has provided fabulous opportunities for what my black friend called "hungry" minorities. Strong families, self-reliance, and a spirit of entrepreneurship should be held up as ideals for all races to emulate.

In the end, we should be very suspicious about Obama's anger and the recent frothing's of his close friend Reverend Wright. Says Eric Hoffer: "The fact seems to be that we are least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about. Vehemence is the expression of a blind effort to support and uphold something that can never stand on its own."

Many of the immigrants from Asia work harder than we do. They think we are lazy, fat, wasteful and are quite proud of the fact that they work harder than we. In my field I am surrounded by Indians, Asians, and fewer Middle Easterners all day long. In NJ foreign born or children of foreign born physicians make up probably a third of all doctors and at least half of those in training.

I hear many of the Indian doctors say it - usually without intending for me to hear it. They always hush up when they notice I may have heard them say it, or if I ask them to clarify, but not out of offense but more out of curiosity.

Look at the winners of the spelling bees.Look at the class leaders of schools.Look at who sit in jails.

Many *white*, and Latino, and black kids are more interested in tatoos, body piercing, and looking and talking like they just got out of a three year stint from jail and that that is something to boast about.

***AMA data suggest fewer than 2 percent of its members are black, and that fewer than 3 percent of the nation's 1 million medical students and physicians are black.***

I can tell you one thing. I don't know about past racism or present racism but the reason for the above *ain't* because of discrimination. Ask any Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, Middle Eastern, Polish, Russian doctor or doctor in training today. The older Indians will have plenty of stories about how hard they had it when they first came off the boat. They were not received with love and open arms. Now look at how successful they are. I congratulate them. I have no sympathy for angry Blacks any more. They need new leadership. Jackson and Sharpton are leading them down the wrong roads.

Why can't we get rid of this "African-American" label. I don't want to be known as a Jewish-American or a second generation Russian-American or a white-American.

****APAMA apologizes to black doctors for past racism

By LINDSEY TANNER, AP Medical Writer Thu Jul 10, 4:27 PM ET

CHICAGO - Transplant surgeon Clive Callender has hurtful memories of being the only black doctor at medical meetings in the 1970s, met with stark silence when he pleaded for better access to transplant organs for blacks.ADVERTISEMENT

So when the American Medical Association formally apologized Thursday for more than a century of policies that excluded blacks from a group long considered the voice of American doctors, it was belated, but still welcome.

"My attitude is not one of bitterness, but one of gratefulness that finally they have seen the error of their ways," said Callender, now 71 and a respected leader at Howard University Hospital in Washington.

It wasn't until the 1960s that AMA delegates took a strong stance against policies dating to the 1800s that barred blacks from some state and local medical societies.

Until then, AMA delegates had resisted pleas to speak out forcefully against discrimination or to condemn the smaller medical groups, which historically have had a big role in shaping AMA policy.

While the AMA itself didn't have a formal policy barring black doctors, physicians were required to be members of the local groups to participate in the AMA, said Dr. Ronald Davis, the group's immediate past president.

It's conceivable patient care suffered "to the extent that our practices may have impeded the ability of African-American physicians to interact collegially with white physicians," Davis said in an interview Thursday.

"That would certainly be another reason why we would have profound regret for our past practices," he said.

In statement on its Web site, the AMA apologized "for its past history of racial inequality toward African-American physicians, and shares its current efforts to increase the ranks of minority physicians and their participation in the AMA."

The apology is among initiatives at the nation's largest doctors' group to reduce racial disparities in medicine and to recruit more blacks to become doctors and to join the AMA.

AMA data suggest fewer than 2 percent of its members are black, and that fewer than 3 percent of the nation's 1 million medical students and physicians are black.

While that's based on a survey in which the race of more than one-third of doctors was unknown, several black physicians said the percentages ring true.

It's not the first time the AMA has apologized for its discriminatory history. In 2005, Dr. John Nelson, then AMA's president, offered a similar apology at a meeting on improving health care and eliminating disparities.

That came a year after the AMA joined the National Medical Association, a black doctors' group, and other minority doctors' groups in forming the Commission to End Health Care Disparities.

NMA leaders said AMA's history of discrimination has contributed to health disparities for blacks that continue today.

"These persistent, race-based health disparities have led to a precipitous decline in the health of African-Americans when compared to their white counterparts and the population as a whole," said Dr. Nedra Joyner, head of the board of trustees for the black doctors' association.

Dr. Nelson Adams, the group's president, called the apology courageous and AMA's vow to work to reduce racial disparities "extremely important."

Dr. Otis Brawley, the black chief financial officer of the American Cancer Society, also applauded the move.

"It is true that what the AMA did historically was awful," Brawley said. "There were AMA local chapters that actually had rules against black members well into the late 1960s, and policies that made blacks not feel comfortable well into the 1980s."

Brawley said he's never been an AMA member, but that the apology "certainly makes me much more interested in working with them."

ANTIOCH, Calif. (AP) - As more and more black renters began moving into this mostly white San Francisco Bay Area suburb a few years ago, neighbors started complaining about loud parties, mean pit bulls, blaring car radios, prostitution, drug dealing and muggings of schoolchildren.

In 2006, as the influx reached its peak, the police department formed a special crime-fighting unit to deal with the complaints, and authorities began cracking down on tenants in federally subsidized housing.

Now that police unit is the focus of lawsuits by black families who allege the city of 100,000 is orchestrating a campaign to drive them out.

"A lot of people are moving out here looking for a better place to live," said Karen Coleman, a mother of three who came here five years ago from a blighted neighborhood in nearby Pittsburg. "We are trying to raise our kids like everyone else. But they don't want us here."

City officials deny the allegations in the lawsuits, which were filed last spring and seek unspecified damages.

Across the country, similar tensions have simmered when federally subsidized renters escaped run-down housing projects and violent neighborhoods by moving to nicer communities in suburban Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles.

But the friction in Antioch is "hotter than elsewhere," said U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development spokesman Larry Bush.

An increasing number of poor families receiving federal rental assistance have been moving here in recent years, partly because of the housing crisis.

A growing number of landlords were seeking a guaranteed source of revenue in a city hard-hit by foreclosures. They began offering their Antioch homes to low-income tenants in the HUD Section 8 housing program, which pays about two-thirds of every tenant's rent.

Between 2000 and 2007, Antioch's black population nearly doubled from 8,824 to 16,316. And the number of Antioch renters receiving federal subsidies climbed almost 50 percent between 2003 and 2007 to 1,582, the majority of them black.

Longtime homeowners complained that the new arrivals brought crime and other troubles. In 2006, violent crime in Antioch shot up about 19 percent from the year before, while property crime went down slightly.

"In some neighborhoods, it was complete madness," said longtime resident David Gilbert, a black retiree who organized the United Citizens of Better Neighborhoods watch group. "They were under siege."

So the Antioch police in mid-2006 created the Community Action Team, which focused on complaints of trouble at low-income renters' homes.

Police sent 315 complaints about subsidized tenants to the Contra Costa Housing Authority, which manages the federal program in the city, and urged the agency to evict many of them for lease violations such as drug use or gun possession. Lawyers for the tenants said 70 percent of the eviction recommendations were aimed at black renters. The housing authority turned down most of the requests.

Coleman said the police, after a complaint from a neighbor, showed up at her house one morning in 2007 to check on her husband, who was on parole for drunken driving. She said they searched the house and returned twice more that summer to try to find out whether the couple had violated any terms of their lease that could lead to eviction.

The Colemans were also slapped with a restraining order after a neighbor accused them of "continually harassing and threatening their family," according to court papers. The Colemans said a judge later rescinded the order.

Coleman and four other families are suing Antioch, accusing police of engaging in racial discrimination and conducting illegal searches without warrants. They have asked a federal judge to make their suit a class-action on behalf of hundreds of other black renters. Another family has filed a lawsuit accusing the city's leaders of waging a campaign of harassment to drive them out.

Police referred questions to the city attorney's office.

City Attorney Lynn Tracy Nerland denied any discrimination on the part of police and said officers were responding to crime reports in troubled neighborhoods when they discovered that a large number of the troublemakers were receiving federal subsidies.

"They are responding to real problems," Nerland said.

Joseph Villarreal, the housing authority chief, said the problems in Antioch mirror tensions seen nationally when poor renters move into neighborhoods they can afford only with government help.

"One of the goals of the programs is to de-concentrate poverty," Villarreal said. "There are just some people who don't want to spend public money that way."

Tensions like those afflicting Antioch have drawn scholars and law enforcement officials to debate whether crime follows subsidized renters out of the tenements to the suburbs.

Susan Popkin, a researcher at the nonprofit Urban Institute, said she does not believe that is the case. But the tensions, she said, are real.

"That can be a recipe for anxiety," she said. "It can really change the demographics of a neighborhood."

Obama, Race, and Affirmative ActionWill the Obama presidency be "conservative" on issues of race?

Cathy Young | January 27, 2009

In the first week after Barack Obama's inauguration, his administration is already dealing with issues and controversies that have nothing to do with race. Still, the cultural significance of a black man becoming President of the United States cannot be overstated, given the pain and the shame of this country's racial history. Even conservative Republicans such as National Review's Jonah Goldberg warn that conservatives who fail to appreciate the greatness of this event risk being hopelessly marginalized. Of course, one oft-overlooked irony is that on racial issues, the Obama presidency may boost a position commonly labeled conservative.

In recent years, affirmative action in the form of institutionalized race-, gender-, and ethnicity-based preferences in college admissions and employment has been the subject of intense debate. Defenders of such programs maintain that they are needed to counteract the effects of discrimination and other subtle barriers. Critics, including African-American conservatives such as writer Shelby Steele and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, argue that preferences have the pernicious effect of deepening racial divisions and stigmatizing the very people they are intended to help.

The movement against race preferences has led to successful voter initiatives banning such practices in the public sector in California, Washington, Michigan, and most recently Nebraska. The backlash from the traditional civil rights establishment and from many liberals has been ferocious. In a 1999 speech, Vice President Al Gore blasted advocates of "colorblind" policies who "use their 'color-blind' the way duck hunters use their duck blind—they hide behind it and hope the ducks won't figure out what they're up to." Last November, a ballot measure prohibiting differential treatment by race or ethnicity in government institutions lost narrowly in Colorado after a campaign that relied heavily on smear tactics, such as trumpeting the Ku Klux Klan's endorsement of the initiative.

Shortly before the inauguration, Ward Connerly, the African-American businessman who has led the drive to ban preferences, spoke at a Washington, D.C. conference of the right-leaning National Association of Scholars. Connerly, a Republican who has found himself labeled an Uncle Tom and worse, began by saying, "We are here in the nation's capital a few days before an event that will demonstrate something most of us in this room have always believed: that America is a fair country and that the colorblind vision works." He noted that he did not vote for Obama, but believed that he deserved to win and that his election was a step forward toward "not just getting beyond racial preferences but getting beyond race."

This hopeful outlook was echoed at the conference by another outspoken critic of preferences: author, scholar, and U.S. Civil Rights Commission member Abigail Thernstrom, who called Obama's election "a racial conversation-changer." That the leader of the free world is now an African-American man, Thernstrom said, must make it easier and more attractive to move past race consciousness and harder to justify preferences with arguments about the intractability of racism. "The younger generation is coming of age in a racially altered world," Thernstrom said; eventually, campus politics will have to catch up.

Are Connerly and Thernstrom too optimistic? A friend of mine who is in a Ph.D. program at a large state university believes it will take at least a generation for the academy to get over its racism fetish. In her view, many academics are far too invested in the idea of deeply entrenched American racism to be swayed by Obama's election; they may even dismiss it as irrelevant because Obama has a white mother and did not grow up in a ghetto. And activists and politicians are no less likely than academics to cling to their dogmas.

Indeed, a small controversy erupted last week when the benediction given at Obama's inauguration by the noted civil rights leader, the Rev. Joseph Lowery, seemed to stress enduring racism: "Lord...we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right."

Some conservatives took offense at the implication that blacks were still "asked to get back" and whites were still refusing to do right by minorities. Yes, it is disappointing that the benediction at the inauguration of our first African-American president sounded a note that would have been forward-looking fifty years ago. But, to put things in perspective, the Rev. Lowery is an 87-year-old veteran of the civil rights struggle. Says Thernstrom, "The Jim Crow South is still the world he lives in."

It remains to be seen what kind of leadership Obama himself will provide on potentially divisive racial issues. During his campaign, he came out against the ballot measures to outlaw preferences—but also suggested that affirmative action should focus on economic disadvantage rather than race.

Undoubtedly, quite a few people—most of whom do not have the excuse of the Rev. Lowery's age and experience—will insist that invidious racism remains ever-present and race-based preference is the only way to combat it. But perhaps such claims will find increasingly less receptive audiences in an age when the daughter of a white factory worker seeking admission to a top college may find herself competing against the daughter of a black President of the United States.

A bit glib here and there, but the questions raised deserve to be part of the conversation.==========================

BUCHANAN TO OBAMA By Patrick J. Buchanan

Barack says we need to have a conversation about race in America. Fair enough. But this time, it has to be a two-way conversation. White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to. This time, the Silent Majority needs to have its convictions, grievances and demands heard. And among them are these:

First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known. Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.

Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the ' 60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream. Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks -- with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas -- to advance black applicants over white applicants. Churches, foundations, civic groups, schools and individuals all over America have donated their time and money to support soup kitchens, adult education, day care, retirement and nursing homes for blacks.

We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude??

Barack talks about new 'ladders of opportunity' for blacks. Let him go to Altoona? And Johnstown, and ask the white kids in Catholic schools how many were visited lately by Ivy League recruiters handing out scholarships for 'deserving' white kids..? Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of white America? Is it really white America's fault that illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent?

Is that the fault of white America or, first and foremost, a failure of the black community itself?

As for racism, its ugliest manifestation is in interracial crime, and especially interracial crimes of violence. Is Barack Obama aware that while white criminals choose black victims 3 percent of the time, black criminals choose white victims 45 percent of the time?

Is Barack aware that black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse?

We have all heard ad nauseam from the Rev. Al about Tawana Brawley, the Duke rape case and Jena . And all turned out to be hoaxes. But about the epidemic of black assaults on whites that are real, we hear nothing.

Sorry, Barack, some of us have heard it all before, about 40 years and 40 trillion tax dollars ago.

By JAMES TARANTOAttorney General Eric Holder ruffled some few feathers Wednesday, when he gave a Black History Month speech in which he described America as "a nation of cowards" when it comes to "things racial":

Though race related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race. It is an issue we have never been at ease with and given our nation's history this is in some ways understandable. And yet, if we are to make progress in this area we must feel comfortable enough with one another, and tolerant enough of each other, to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.

We are inclined to disagree with Holder's suggestion that everyday life is impoverished by an insufficiency of "frank conversations" about racial subjects. Often it is just plain sensible to put aside "matters that continue to divide us" and focus on common purposes or interests. What Holder desires sounds nightmarish to us: a cross between "No Exit" and "All in the Family," with none of the latter's wit.

Still, there is a grain of truth to Holder's infelicitous description of America as "a nation of cowards." The subject of race does make people uneasy, and for reasons that go beyond common sense and courtesy. An incident on the same day as Holder's speech illustrates the problem.

On Wednesday the New York Post published a cartoon by Sean Delonas depicting a pair of policemen and a the bullet-riddled body of a chimpanzee. As one of the cops holds a smoking gun, the other says, "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill."

Reuters describes what happened next:

Hundreds of demonstrators rallied to boycott the New York Post on Thursday, branding the newspaper as racist for publishing a cartoon that appeared to compare President to a chimpanzee. Demonstrators led by civil rights activist Al Sharpton chanted "End racism now!" outside the parent company's skyscraper in midtown Manhattan and called for the jailing of Rupert Murdoch, whose international media conglomerate News Corp owns the Post. . . .Because Obama promoted the $787 billion economic stimulus that he signed into law on Tuesday, critics of the cartoon interpreted the dead chimp as a reference to Obama, who became the first black U.S. president on January 20. . . . "You would have to be in a time warp or in a whole other world not to know what that means," said demonstrator Charles Ashley, 25, a model who did not believe the cartoon was an innocent political joke.

Others said it made light of assassinating Obama, a possibility they said that worries many African-Americans.Here we should note that News Corp. also owns The Wall Street Journal and this Web site. The Post is standing its ground, declaring in an editorial today:

To those who were offended by the image, we apologize.

However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past--and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback.

To them, no apology is due.

The claim that the cartoon was a racist caricature of President Obama is awfully far-fetched. It played off a news item involving an actual chimp (a story with which we are thoroughly bored, so click here if you want to learn more about it). The president did not write the stimulus bill; indeed, he has been widely criticized for giving congressional Democrats too free a hand in crafting it. And anyone who is familiar with Delonas's surrealistic oeuvre knows that he is an equal-opportunity offender. His work is in the spirit of "South Park," not Stepin Fetchit.

All that notwithstanding, some will say that Delonas should have known better. We see their point, and we remember thinking a couple of years ago, upon seeing the umpteenth simian caricature of George W. Bush, that nobody had better do that if Sen. Obama becomes president. We were aware that that would constitute an invidious stereotype, in a way that it did not when the president was a person of pallor.

But what if someone is unaware of this? Suppose that a columnist or cartoonist is so innocent of racial prejudice that he has never even thought to make a connection between black people and lower primates? Such a person would be a racial kerfuffle waiting to happen. The moment he inadvertently employed an idea or image that carried offensive connotations, he would be pilloried as "insensitive."

Consider the paradox: Racial "sensitivity" requires not eradicating racial stereotypes but keeping them alive--and not only keeping them alive but remaining acutely conscious of them at all times. Delonas and his editors are under attack for seeing "chimp" and failing to think "black guy." Perhaps this is an editorial failing, but it is certainly not a moral one.

Which brings us back to Eric Holder. If Americans are shy about discussing race, a big reason is the culture of intimidation promoted by people like Al Sharpton in the name of racial sensitivity. "Frank discussion" requires a willingness to trust that one's interlocutor is acting in good faith. If Attorney General Holder is serious about promoting racial candor, let him use this incident to make the point. That would show a bit of courage on his part.

These images show members of the Ku Klux Klan as they want to be seen, scary and secretive and waiting in the wings for Barack and his colour-blind vision for America to fail. Anthony Karen, a former Marine and self-taught photojournalist was granted access to the innermost sanctum of the Klan. He doesn’t tell us how he did it but he was considered trustworthy enough to be invited into their homes and allowed to photograph their most secretive ceremonies, such as the infamous cross burnings.

When he talks about the Klan members he has encountered he tends not to dwell on the fate of their victims. Karen’s feat is that he takes us to places few photojournalists have been before, into the belly of the beast. The scenes he presents portray a kinder, gentler Klan. The mute photographs present an organisation that is far less threatening than the hate group of our popular imagination. Consciously or otherwise, his photographs hold our imagination in their grip while doing double duty as propaganda for the extremist right, much as Leni Riefenstahl’s work did for the Nazis.

Today the Klan is a mere shadow of what it used to be and there are at least 34 differently named Klan groups. “They are a fairly low-rent bunch of people, many of whom use their local organisations as a way of raising money for themselves,” says Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama.Related articles

* More Americas News

Photographs of the Klan folk in their hooded regalia aren’t all that rare. The archives of America’s newspapers contain plenty of front-page photographs of lynchings throughout the past century. Three years ago, James Cameron, the last survivor of an attempted lynching died, thankfully of natural causes.

The older generation of Black Americans grew up hearing about Klan lynchings whispered over the dinner table but never mentioned outside the home. At the Klan’s height, around the turn of the 20th century, some 30 to 40 lynchings a year were being recorded. It is believed that there were in fact many more unrecorded deaths, especially in the cotton-growing south where the deaths of black field-hands were often not recorded.

Karen’s photographs show an entirely different side of the far right. He presents a 58-year-old, fifth-generation seamstress he calls “Ms Ruth” and he has photographed her running up an outfit for the “Exalted Cyclops” or head of a local KKK chapter. She gets paid about $140 for her trouble. Karen tells us that she uses the earnings to help care for her 40-year-old quadriplegic daughter, who was injured in a car accident 10 years ago.

Karen’s images of the Klan and its supporters regularly appear on the recruiting websites of the far right. Out of context, the images of hooded Klansmen and their families tell us little of the real story – the inexorable rise in the number of extremist organisations in America.

The number of hate-crime victims in the US is also rising and as America’s middle and working class gets thrown out of work, the hate groups behind the crimes are flourishing. As people lose their homes to foreclosure and, without the benefit of a safety net, find themselves slipping into poverty, there is already a search for scapegoats underway. Immigrants from central and South America have become particular targets as the grim economic times take hold.

Anyone who doubts the capacity of the modern KKK for violence need look no further than the recent case of 43-year-old Cynthia Lynch of Tulsa, Oklahoma. She had never been out of her home state before she travelled to Louisiana to be initiated into the Klan. She was met off the bus by two members of a group that calls itself the Sons of Dixie and taken to a campsite in the woods 60 miles north of New Orleans.

There, Lynch’s head was shaven and after 24 hours of Klan boot camp, including chanting and running with torches, she had had enough and asked to be taken to town. After an argument, the group’s “Grand Lordship”, Chuck Foster, is alleged to have shot her to death. He was charged with second-degree murder and is awaiting trial. Just as shocking is that the event happened in Bogalusa, a backwoods Louisiana town that was once known as the Klan capital of the US.

In the 1960s the Klan operated with impunity in Bogalusa and once held a public meeting to decide which black church to burn down next. Local Klan members were suspected of ambushing two black policemen in 1965, killing one and wounding the other. No one was ever tried for the crimes.

Despite all its notoriety the Klan has been a spent force for decades with nothing like the clout it once wielded. At its peak the KKK boasted four million members and controlled the governor’s mansions and legislatures of several states. Since the 1930s the KKK has been in a state of disorganisation and today it probably has 6,000 members. But the economic crisis is swelling their ranks and already, a month after the inauguration of the first black president, the tidal wave of interracial harmony that greeted Obama’s election is starting to recede.

“Things are certain to get worse,” says Potok. “The ingredients are all there: a dire economy that is certain to get worse; high levels of immigration; the white majority that is soon to turn into a minority and a black man in the White House.”

More than 400 hate-related incidents, from cross-burnings to effigies of President Obama hanging from nooses have been reported, according to law-enforcement authorities and Potok’s organisation, which files lawsuits against hate groups aimed at making them bankrupt.

Late last year, two suspected skinheads who had links to a violent Klan chapter in Kentucky were charged with plotting to kill 88 black students. They were then going to assassinate President Obama by blasting him from a speeding car while wearing white tuxedos and top hats. They were never going to succeed, given the huge security net around Obama, but the fact that they had planned such an outlandish attack may be a harbinger of things to come.

“There is a tremendous backlash to Obama’s election,” says Richard Barrett, the leader of the Nationalist Movement, another white supremacist group. “Many people look at the flag of the Republic of New Africa that was hoisted over the White House as an act of war.

"You see, it's not the blood you spill that gets you what you want, it's the blood you share. Your family, your friendships, your community, these are the most valuable things a man can have." Before Dishonor - Hatebreed

I dunno, I suppose that is what the flag stands for now that Obama is in office.(Not that I believe that)

« Last Edit: February 24, 2009, 05:54:22 PM by Robertlk808 »

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"You see, it's not the blood you spill that gets you what you want, it's the blood you share. Your family, your friendships, your community, these are the most valuable things a man can have." Before Dishonor - Hatebreed

Attorney General Eric Holder, a Clinton administration retread, wants to revive Bill Clinton’s National Conversation on Race. (What’s next? Hillarycare?) Holder recently told his Justice Department employees that the United States was a “nation of cowards” for not talking more about race. “It is an issue we have never been at ease with and, given our nation’s history, this is in some ways understandable,” Holder said. “If we are to make progress in this area, we must feel comfortable enough with one another and tolerant enough of each other to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.”

Is he nuts? Leave aside for a moment Holder’s purely decorative call for a “frank” conversation about race. The Clinton-era Conversation also purported to be frank, and we know what that meant: a one-sided litany of white injustices. Please raise your hand if you haven’t heard the following bromides about “the racial matters that continue to divide us” more times than you can count: Police stop and arrest blacks at disproportionate rates because of racism; blacks are disproportionately in prison because of racism; blacks are failing in school because of racist inequities in school funding; the black poverty rate is the highest in the country because of racism; blacks were given mortgages that they couldn’t afford because of racism. I will stop there.

Not only do colleges, law schools, almost all of the nation’s elite public and private high schools, and the mainstream media, among others, have “conversations about . . . racial matters”; they never stop talking about them. Any student who graduates from a moderately selective college without hearing that its black students are victims of institutional racism—notwithstanding the fact that the vast majority of black students there will have been deliberately admitted with radically lower SAT scores than their white and Asian comrades—has been in a coma throughout his time there.

Education bureaucrats maintain an incessant harangue on white racism because they see the writing on the wall: most students are indifferent to race and just want to get along. If left to themselves, they would go about their business perfectly happily and color-blindly, and the race industry would wither on the vine. Thus the institutional imperative to remind black students constantly about their victimization and the white students about their guilt. Last month, the elite Phillips Academy at Andover proudly announced a student presentation on White Privilege: A History and Its Role in Education. Would the student have come up with such a topic on her own without the school’s educators deliberately immersing her in such trivial matters? Of course not.

But if Attorney General Holder is really sincere about wanting a “frank” conversation about race, he should put the following items on the agenda:

The American electorate. The country just elected its first black president. And it actually didn’t talk a lot about Barack Obama’s race during the election, thank heavens, because most Americans were more interested in the candidate’s ideas than in his skin color. There were undoubtedly hundreds of thousands of people who wouldn’t vote for Obama because of his race. I would guess that their average age was 75. There is no question that a great many geriatric Americans continue to harbor the rankest racism for blacks, but guess what? They’re not going to be around for much longer. Young people growing up in the last 30 years live on a different planet when it comes to racial attitudes—until the educrats start playing with their minds.

We might also talk about those legions of older, black Americans who have held on to their love of country and belief in its ideals, despite having been subjected to America at its worst. I have had the privilege to speak to many such individuals for my work, and they have broken my heart with their dignity and nobility. Rather than reflexively consulting professional race activists for insights into race in America, the media and politicians might for once seek some voices that contradict the mandatory “angry black male” trope.

Crime. Holder told his Justice Department employees that they had a special responsibility to advance racial understanding, according to the Associated Press. Uh-oh. Before and during Holder’s first stint at Justice, when he served as Clinton’s deputy attorney general, the department’s civil rights division specialized in slapping onerous federal consent decrees on police departments. Its assumption was that racial disparities in cops’ stop-and-arrest rates reflected police racism, not racial disparities in crime rates.

Before Holder and his attorneys revive that practice, they should study certain facts that remain taboo in the mainstream media. For instance, the homicide rate for black men between the ages of 18 and 24 is well over ten times that of whites. And disparities in other violent-crime rates are just as startling. In New York City, one of the nation’s safest large cities, 83 percent of all gun assailants were black during the first six months of 2008, according to victims and witnesses, though blacks make up only 24 percent of the city’s population. Add Hispanic perps, and you account for 98 percent of all shootings in New York City. The face of violent crime in cities is almost exclusively black or brown. That explains why someone might feel a sense of trepidation when approached by a group of black youths. That’s not racism; it’s the reality of crime. And it’s that reality that determines whom the police stop, frisk, and arrest.

Education. Commentators on NPR’s “black” show, News and Notes, recently groused about the lack of black policy experts on the Sunday talk shows but ignored the possibility that the education gap might have something to do with it. Blacks, they said, need to be twice as qualified as whites to get a job. Let’s look at the evidence. The black high school drop-out rate approaches 50 percent. On the 2006 SAT, the average score in the critical-reading section was 434 for blacks, 527 for whites, and 510 for Asians; in the math section, 429 for blacks, 536 for whites, and 587 for Asians; and in the writing section, 428 for blacks, 519 for whites, and 512 for Asians. America’s lousy showing in international math, science, and reading tests compared with Japan and Western Europe is influenced in large part by the low scores of blacks and Hispanics. If blacks and Hispanics performed at the level that whites do, the U.S. would lead all industrialized nations in reading and would lead Europe in math and science, according to a study published in the Phi Delta Kappan in 2005.

Likewise, after their first year of legal education, 51 percent of blacks labor in the bottom tenth of their class; two-thirds reside in the bottom fifth. Blacks are four times as likely as whites to fail the bar exam on the first try. Until such achievement disparities are eliminated, any allegations of racial discrimination in the absence of proportional numbers of black policy wonks—or law partners, chemists, engineers, or investment bankers—is absurd, especially when the nation’s elite institutions are doing everything they can to recruit black students, professors, and employees. Perhaps Holder could confront the stigma against academic achievement among many black youth, who deride studying and staying out of trouble as “acting white.”

The family. Closing the educational achievement gap will be difficult as long as the black illegitimacy rate is nearly 71 percent, compared with a white rate of 26 percent. Taxpayers foot the bill for this family breakdown—when fatherless children who never learned self-control and self-discipline disrupt classrooms and prevent other children from learning, and when the same fatherless children get sucked up into gang life and fail to connect with the world of work and responsibility. Many poor single mothers work heroically to raise law-abiding sons, but the odds are against them.

When communities resist an influx of Section 8 housing-voucher holders from the inner city, say, they are reacting overwhelmingly to behavior. Skin color is a proxy for that behavior. If inner-city blacks behaved like Asians—cramming as much knowledge into their kids as they can possibly fit into their skulls—the lingering wariness towards lower-income blacks that many Americans unquestionably harbor would disappear. Are there irredeemable racists among Americans? To be sure. They come in all colors, and we should deplore all of them. But the issue of race in the United States is more complex than polite company is usually allowed to express. If Eric Holder wants to crank up our racial preoccupations even further, let him at least do so with a full airing of the facts.

Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

By Ed KaitzSome years ago at a major university out west I was hired to teach minority students courses in expository writing. Most of my students were African-American. They were part of a "bridge program" at the university that allowed "provisional" students (those whose entrance scores were sub par) to demonstrate within a year that they could handle the academic regimen at the school.

I realized that most of the students had been accepted through an affirmative action policy, but I was committed to helping them make the grade. My strategy was simple: hitch their sense of self-respect and self-confidence to their performance in the class. In other words, help them to understand that self-esteem is a product of achievement.

There was one major problem with my strategy. Every one of my colleagues teaching in the same writing program was convinced that race, not achievement, was the basis for a minority student's self-esteem. This ideology pervaded the mentality of the entire staff -- black and white -- from the lowliest tutors to the director of the writing program. Students were persuaded by their progressive instructors to explore only one topic in their writing: white oppression. In fact, of the hundreds of essays and drafts that I read I cannot remember one essay that managed to stray from the central theme: minority = oppressed, white = oppressor.

There was one class period that I will never forget. During a break in my lecture I asked several of the students what they intended to choose as a major. Some of the students said "sociology" while others said "ethnic studies" or "communications." When I asked if anyone wanted to choose "engineering" as a major a student in the back of the room loudly declared that engineering was a "white" profession. When my jaw nearly hit the floor most of the students burst out in laughter. I had never heard anything like this. I quickly recovered however and quietly told myself that for the remainder of the class I was now going to play the student. I wanted to let these black kids teach me something I'd probably never forget.

For the next twenty minutes I stood at the chalkboard writing down the names of common professions. Next to the profession I let the students direct me to writing either "white" or "black" based on their perception of "correct" life choices for people of color. There was raucous laughter and the students were at the edge of their seats proclaiming their judgments in near unison. Mathematician? White. Architect? White. Athlete? Black. Musician? Black. Engineer? White. Chemist? White. Physicist? White. Journalist? (this one caused some confusion) Teacher? Black. Economist? White. Business? White.

After we had covered the board with our list, I asked the students to consider the possibility of crossing over to one of the "white" professions. The response was unanimous: such a compromise would render the student an "Oreo." The students believed that a black engineer, for example, was black on the outside but unfortunately white on the inside.

During the several years I taught in the minority writing program, foreign students would often be allowed to join the writing course in order to improve their English and composition skills. Of these the Nigerian students were by far my favorites. Their respect for scholarship, learning, and academic achievement was unmatched. Their essays ranged in interest from international affairs to advertising -- and the quality of their work was excellent.

What fascinated me was how the classroom dynamic changed with the addition of the students from Nigeria. The African-American students looked at the coal black Nigerians like they had landed from Mars. For their part, the Nigerians rarely showed any interest in the culture of the black students on campus.

After leaving the minority writing program and later graduate school with a doctorate in philosophy, I spent years at several other universities teaching courses that were attended by Hindus, Arabs, Persians, Chinese, Japanese and yes, more of the excellent Nigerians. Their majors ranged from economics to foreign languages. In fact, I cannot remember a sociology or ethnic studies major among any of them. The difference? The word "Oreo," for these non African American minorities, really meant a cookie. Race never threatened the freedom they enjoyed to be individuals.

The philosopher Eric Hoffer once wrote that "the plight of the Negro in America is that he is a Negro first and only secondly an individual." When Attorney General Eric Holder recently called us a "nation of cowards" he was looking through a prism unknown to his Nigerian brothers. Holder, like Mr. Obama, is the product of an education system and a movement for black liberation that is blind to the virtues of individualism. These men and women are coddled products of an inexhaustible grievance industry that has the unfortunate effect of trapping eager and aspiring young black kids into severely limited life choices. Simply put, by saturating their worldview with color, men like Holder and Obama end up closing doors rather than opening them.

Eric Hoffer understood however that there was an advantage to the kind of race hysteria fanned by the grievance industry. Hoffer argued that individualism is a frightening proposition to many. Those who choose freedom and self-reliance must "grope for a purpose in life" and they are often condemned to "eating their hearts out over wasted opportunities." In short, when you're free, there's no one to blame but yourself. Success is built on the more mundane virtues of patience and perseverance. As for the race hustling elites however Hoffer had this to say:

"Grievance and extravagant hope are meat and drink to their souls, and there is a hero's garment to fit any size, and an imperishable alibi to justify individual failure."

Citizens of all colors are about to witness on a national scale what has been quietly fermenting for decades within the Ivory Tower: a crystallization of ethnic identity so rigid that dialogue becomes virtually impossible. This isn't the fault of those who have championed the philosophy of identity through achievement. It's the product of selfish elite race hustlers who rarely if ever had the patience and determination to grind away and "grope for a purpose in life" like many of their lower and middle class black brothers. Of all the evaluations I received from the black students at the writing program there is one I'll never forget: "Ed makes me want to succeed."

Instead of a dialogue on race Mr. Holder, why don't we discuss some of these topics: personal finance, starting a business, sports, history, philosophy, art, fishing, raising children, God, or one of my favorite topics, music.

In fact, one of America's greatest and most precious dialogues between black and white took place in a sound studio in New York City back in 1959. That was when the immortal jazz great Miles Davis defied some serious criticism coming from the black community and chose the white Bill Evans to accompany the famed group on piano. Why, the black community wondered, when there were so many great black jazz pianists, did Davis pick Evans? The answer is quite simple: Bill Evans was the best (sorry Art Tatum fans). The result? The best selling and most beautiful jazz album of all time: Kind of Blue.

Here's some advice for the Attorney General: Do you want Americans to make some great music together? Forget about skin color.

The Coen Brothers’ 2007 film [1] No Country for Old Men revolves around the tale of several young men engaged in a violent race for a satchel of cash. Tommy Lee Jones plays an aging sheriff investigating the depressing trail of bloodshed, markings that inform the old man that the customs and morals that guided his generation have decayed even faster than he has. Jones ends up as a depiction of the anguish experienced by people left without a country they can call home.

Democrats remain on their quest to offer similar anguish to African-Americans, as liberals now embark on their fifth decade aimed at stripping these reliable party constituents of American nationalism.

Liberal mouthpieces have long emphasized a shameful American history, one marked by slavery and segregation. And they insist that, even today, a majority of Americans hold contempt for dark-skinned people. “Something is clearly wrong when the government’s most effective affirmative-action program is the preference people of color receive when entering not college, but the criminal-justice system,” proclaims one prominent progressive text titled [2] A Covenant with Black America — which goes on to say that there is “a multi-headed, multi-tentacled monster out there devouring blacks who live in certain neighborhoods.”

Such rhetoric has caused many African-Americans to experience feelings of anti-Americanism and national detachment. Blacks now see mirages of racism everywhere, albeit disguised by “code words” and “institutional racism.” The outrage last year over Barack Obama being referred to as “articulate” provided a powerful example of this paranoia.

Anger and hatred typically accompany blacks’ racial anxiety. Before the start of a game last year, the NBA’s [3] Josh Howard said to a live camera, “‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is going on. I don’t celebrate this [expletive]. I’m black.” Denver Nuggets guard [4] Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf refused to even stand for the national anthem, stating that the American flag was a “symbol of oppression” and that the United States had a long “history of tyranny.”

In Democratic circles, this is known as “patriotism.”

These are not so much black sentiments as they are liberal. But many blacks now subscribe to the anti-American wing of contemporary liberalism.

Last year Michelle Obama said that America was “just downright mean” and admitted, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.” And any Google search of Jeremiah Wright provides a score of videos showing Barack Obama’s longtime pastor condemning America for practicing “state terrorism” and for “inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.” We find him referring to the United States as the “U.S. of KKK A.” and thundering, “Not God Bless America. Goddamn America!”

His all-black congregation cheers.

To be without a home is to live with pain. But this has been the Democratic scheme for decades — to promote government intrusion by convincing minorities that most Americans, especially Republicans, reject them. Republicans are racist and against affirmative action. Democrats care and will give you stuff.

The misinformation campaign has succeeded. Many black Americans now view racial solidarity as more important than black individualism. Each year a handful of notorious black leaders convene the State of the Black Union, calling all “brothers” to recognize the uniformed plight that all African-Americans endure. Liberals stripped blacks of their country. So they concocted a new one — the Black Union.

Because racial camaraderie has resulted in more than 90% of blacks predictably voting for Democrats, the advice to be more “inclusive” is oft delivered to the GOP. Replicate the way in which Democrats pander to minorities in order to attract blacks to the Republican Party.

But safeguarding the feelings of minorities by adhering to liberals’ politically correct pap is precisely the cause of blacks’ adoption of big-government, anti-American liberalism. Do Republicans really want to be associated with such a philosophy?

The advice is backwards. Blacks are the ones to make concessions. They must abandon their liberalism before the party of conservatism can consider their membership. A simple matter of principle.

Yet, in order to convince Republicans to alter their strategy, Los Angeles-based writer Chaise Nunnally recently [5] referenced the Don Imus controversy in which Imus referred to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hoes.” Even though Nunnally found the opinions expressed by conservatives involved in the debate “legitimate and defensible,” he thought “they also struck the wrong note in communicating with the black community on a racially sensitive topic.”

Nunnally’s counsel was to be more racially symbolic, recommending Republicans find “a more race-sensitive tack to woo black voters.” Join the left in their truth-stifling political correctness in order to trick blacks into voting for you.

That’s how much liberals respect minorities.

Republicans would be better off listening to black conservative columnist Thomas Sowell, who recently reminded his readers, “Most Americans’ principles are closer to those of the Republicans than to those of the Democrats. … [Republicans] won big when they stood for something and told the people what that something was. … Ronald Reagan was the classic example. But another example would be the stunning Republican victories in the 1994 Congressional elections. … Articulating the message of Newt Gingrich’s ‘contract for America’ was a key to that historic victory.”

Republicans win when they underline conservatism, not when they dilute their principles by pandering to special interests. They should leave such prostitution to the Democrats.

For black Americans addicted to Democrats’ coddling sense of self-pity and collectivism, they will find no such slavery within the Republican Party. Only when blacks finally recognize the big-government whip held in Democratic hands can the party of Lincoln help them regain their independence, sustain their dignity, strengthen their families, and recapture their country.

Less than a month after being confirmed as the nation's attorney General, Eric H. Holder Jr. called out the American people as "essentially a nation of cowards" for refusing to talk openly about race.

So, thank you, professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and President Obama, for starting the long-awaited national discussion on black and white identity - while averting our attention from the cockamamie scheme to nationalize health care.

And kudos to the professor and the president for choosing Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department as the representative of the Caucasian-American side of this difficult and much-needed historic debate.

Poetry was at work as the archetypal racist white cop who, according to the admittedly fact-challenged president, "stupidly" arrested his "friend." Sgt. Crowley waged a swift and effective public relations campaign that quashed the racism meme that Mr. Gates was recklessly pushing.

Sgt. Crowley, as it happens, is the Cambridge police force's hand-picked racial profiling expert and was selected by a former black police commissioner. He also performed CPR on black basketball star Reggie Lewis, whose widow praised the public servant for doing everything he could to save her husband. Sgt. Crowley's own police department immediately jumped to his defense in a picture-perfect multiracial photo op and press conference.

Even though Mr. Gates and Sgt. Crowley are poised to put their individual grievances to rest - over a beer negotiated by the president of the United States - the scope of the problem that brought them international attention lingers, underscoring the need for continued robust public dialogue.

We're finally talking, Mr. Holder and Mr. Obama. Why stop now?

Of course, the attorney general is essentially right in his assessment. Much of America is petrified to bring up race, especially in public forums - the media, in particular. But for exactly the opposite reasons Mr. Holder, the Obama administration and the brain trust of modern liberalism assert.

Americans, especially nonblacks, are deeply fearful that the dynamic is predicated on an un-American premise: presumed guilt. Innocence, under the extra-constitutional reign of political correctness, liberalism's brand of soft Shariah law, must be proved ex post facto.

Think not? Ask the Duke lacrosse team, which had 88 of the school's professors sign a petition that presumed their guilt before their side of the story was known. Even though the white athletes were exonerated and the liberal district attorney who pushed the case was dethroned, disbarred and disgraced, the professoriate that assigned guilt to its own students still refuses to apologize.

While the media was front and center in preparing for the public executions of the three Duke lacrosse players, they scurried away when they were proved innocent. The Democratic Media Complex, in its pursuit of Orwellian hate-crime legislation, reparations and sundry non-ameliorative resolutions to America's troubled racial past, pursues its victims with blood lust. But it cannot act in good faith to redeem those it has destroyed in countless rushes to judgment. (Richard Jewell, R.I.P.)

The mainstream media choose to flaunt story lines that make white America appear guilty of continued institutional racism, while black racism against whites is ignored as an acceptable disposition given our nation's history. This double standard provides a game board on which the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton can thrive in perpetuity and ensures racial progress is slowed.

And that is why the Case of Sergeant Crowley vs. Professor Gates is so important. As is expected from professional race baiters, Mr. Gates instigated a public brouhaha over race. And Mr. Obama, a man who attended the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's racist sermons for 20 years, used the bully pulpit to grant his friend a national platform to condemn a man for doing his job.

Sgt. Crowley, a proud and defiant public professional, played the moment perfectly and stopped his own assassination by media. Talk about a postmodern hero. Whether he likes it or not, Sgt. Crowley is a potent symbol of how the union has managed to become more perfect, a Rosa Parks of rush-to-judgment "reverse racism."

Now that the facts of the case show that his friend the professor was the man doing the racial profiling, the president wants to end the discussion.

Now we see what the attorney general meant when he spoke of cowards.

• Andrew Breitbart is publisher of the news portals Breitbart.com and Breitbart.tv. His latest endeavor, Big Hollywood (http://bighollywood.breitbart.com), is a group blog on Hollywood and politics from the center-right perspective.

Guest Opinionby Professor John Evans Evans-JohnHarvard School of Harvard Faculty Asshole StudiesHarvard University

When I first learned of the arrest of my colleague Professor Henry Louis "Skip" Gates after he stood up to the fascist jackboots of a declasse, ill-educated Cambridge police officer, I was of course angered -- but scarcely shocked. L'Affaire Gates simply aired, in public, the dirty 100-thread-count table linen of an American culture where Harvard faculty assholes still face a daily struggle against profiling, abuse, and insolence.

It will come as no surprise that Skip's arrest was the talk of the Douchebag Room at the Harvard Faculty Club last Friday. I and a group of colleagues had assembled for our weekly lunch; I opted for their competently-prepared Ahi Tuna Tartare and an amusing glass of '05 Hospices de Beaune Premier Cru Cuvee Cyrot-Chaudron. I had noticed that the Franz Fanon Memorial Booth -- Skip's long-reserved lunch spot -- was uncharacteristically empty, and asked our waiter Sergio for an explanation.

"Professor Skeep, he no is come today," said Sergio. "I tink he is in the jail."

Our table exchanged knowing glances, for we knew immediately that Skip was only the latest victim of a system that singles out the Harvard faculty asshole for stigmatization and unequal justice. It is a system that all of us knew too well, and provided an opportunity for an open conversation about our shared experiences as Harvard faculty assholes in America while waiting for Sergio to bring the dessert cart.

One after one came the cascade of stark stories: the rolled eyes of our department secretaries. The Spanish language mockery of our office janitors. The foul gestures of drunken strap-hanging Red Sox lumpenproles aboard the MBTA. The frequent police stops on the highway to Cape Ann and Martha's Vineyard for "Volvoing While Asshole." And then there are the insulting media stereotypes, where we are routinely caricatured as pompous, effete, self-important, irrelevant elitists. All, I might add, by a motley collection of lowbrow inferiors, few of whom have ever published in a peer-reviewed journal. Let alone edit one.

Sometimes it even comes at the hand of self-styled "peers" from D-list state ampersand institutions. One colleague recounted the tale of his restroom confrontation with a Texas A&M professor at a national academic conference last year. After relieving themselves at adjacent urinals, my colleague noticed the oaf leaving hastily for the plenary session and decided to gently point out his hygienic forgetfulness. "A Harvard man washes his hands after urinating," he said. "And an Aggie don't piss all over his hands, asshole," came the reply.

A female colleague from the English department recalled a recent incident along the Charles River jogging path during her regular morning run. A confused passer-by rudely interrupted her progress and requested directions, as if my colleague were some sort of lowly campus guide or untenured adjunct. "Where does this street go to?" she demanded. Naturally, my colleague took the opportunity to correct her, noting that "at Harvard we do not end our sentences in prepositions."

"Okay, Where does this street go to, asshole?" barked the interloper. Needless to say, my colleague's daily morning runs have since been replaced with tear-filled visits to the Faculty Asshole Self Esteem Counseling Center.

For untold hundreds of Harvard faculty assholes such indignities are, sadly, still part and parcel of being "The Other." As Associate Director of the School of Harvard Faculty Asshole Studies, I have worked to institute policies to insure that Harvard maintains a nurturing environment for all assholes in our community, be they faculty, students, or alumni. Some progress has been made, such as Harvard's mandatory sensitivity and deference training program for all incoming freshassholes. But such internal programs do little to address the impertinence and discrimination we still face outside campus. Some have suggested that we involve the Cambridge Police Department in an educational outreach program, but in my experience the CPD is among the worst offenders.

Case in point: last winter I was slated to deliver the keynote address for an intradepartmental asshole colloquium at Lowell House. Running late, I temporarily parked along Plympton. As I emerged from my Audi, I discovered that I had captured the unwelcome attention of a CPD officer. "Hey Buddy, is that your car?" he barked.

"Why? Because I'm a Harvard faculty asshole in America?" I cleverly retorted.

"No asshole, because this is a snow route and you can't double park here," he sneered, concocting a flimsy excuse for his continued harassment. "You have to move it now."

"That's Professor Asshole to you, you fascist townie," I explained, tossing him the Audi's remote-start key. "Need a valet? Call your mother at the brothel."

It doesn't take an experienced asshole rights activist to tell you what happened next: my Audi was on its way to impound while I rode to the Cambridge Police Station in the unheated vinyl rear seat of Bull Conner's squad car. To add insult to injury, the desk officer refused my request for a dignified background bookshelf for my booking photos.

Thankfully the Constitution still allows even Harvard Assholes a bare modicum of human rights, so I used my allotted phone call to alert the Dean and the Faculty Grievance Committee to my plight. In those 35 excruciating minutes I wasted away waiting in that stark cell, I wrote the opening chapter of "Letters From a Cambridge Jail," my forthcoming scholarly magnum opus on the grim legacy of Asshole oppression in America.

Eventually my arrest record was expunged and I agreed to meet the loathsome arresting officer at President Faust's office for a conciliatory off-record "beer chat." As the University Counsel had predicted, the lure of free limitless alcohol proved irresistible to the simpleminded Irishman, and he was soon happily signing confessions of guilt and abject apologies. Still, even after he was fired, I was left to pick up the pieces of my shattered psyche.

As I recounted the details of that unpleasant encounter to my colleagues, a few wondered aloud if we were not better served by changing the system gradually. Then our eyes turned to the stately historic portraits of the Harvard faculty assholes who came before us, hanging in silent judgment on the Douchebag Room walls; Schlessinger, Galbraith, Leary, Cornel West, Alan Dershowitz, Theodore Kaczynski. Would these great assholes have accepted complicit silence in the face of crude police insolence? How will we be remembered by future generations of Harvard faculty assholes who will battle future generations of Cambridge police and parking enforcement officials? Where is Sergio with the damned dessert cart?

Some suggest that the election of President Obama proves that America's prejudice against Harvard assholes is a quaint relic of the past. But for those of us who live with it every day, the evidence shows the opposite. And it isn't just Harvard assholes suffering the cold, rude hand of uppity townie privilege. Other, if less endowed, asshole faculties suffer similar oppression; in the southern Lacrosse fields of Duke, in the west coast arugula farms of Stanford, at Northwestern, where ever Northwestern is.

No, we must not be silent. That is why I have used a portion of my class action windfall against the Cambridge Police department to produce a shocking new documentary film, "Asshole Like Me," detailing the courageous plight of the tenured Sphincter-American community. It premiers this Friday at the Science Center. Get your tickets now -- with free beer on tap, demand will be high!

Welcome to America’s longest running hit show — the race farce, in which feigned shock and outrage lead to fawning apologies and bumbling explanations to all the wrong people. Taking offense has been reduced to low comedy in America, as hypocrites play out their assigned parts.

Sen. Harry Reid was quoted in a new book as enthusing in 2008 about Obama’s candidacy because he is “light skinned” and speaks without a “Negro dialect, unless he wants one.” Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post called it “beyond stupid” to use the word “Negro” in 2008. Liz Cheney labeled Reid’s words “fairly racist.” And Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele opened up to full throttle, calling on Reid to step down as majority leader.

Senator Reid understood his part in the drama. He apologized to the president and to “any and all Americans, especially African Americans, for my improper comments.” The majority leader then made personal calls to a number of African Americans who could, he hoped, offer remission of sins. Among these were reportedly Eleanor Holmes Norton, Donna Brazile, and . . . Al Sharpton.

Actually, if you read between the lines, it doesn’t look as though Reid phoned Sharpton but the other way around. The figure who became an American celebrity by attempting to frame innocent men for an invented racial attack, Sharpton issued a statement of forgiveness after noting that he and the leader had spoken. No Democrat in Harry Reid’s position would dare to refuse a call from Sharpton under these circumstances. Thus does Sharpton burnish his reputation as the “go to” guy for racial absolution. Deft.

Some Reid defenders have been at pains to point out that Reid was supporting Obama’s candidacy and that his words should be understood in that context. This is the part in the play when Democrats’ sins are washed clean because they favor the minimum wage, health-care reform, and card check. As Eleanor Holmes Norton put it, Reid gets a pass because he “has earned it with long support of civil rights and issues that matter most to African Americans.” President Obama applied the same standard, accepting Reid’s apology because he has shown “passionate leadership on matters of social justice” and because the president “knows what’s in Harry’s heart.”

With due respect to the Republicans, who simply could not help themselves in the face of this big fat opportunity to play turnabout, this is not seemly. It’s true and glaringly obvious that the Democrats have honed this hair-trigger race sensitivity into a political tool that shoots only right, not left. It’s so true that no one gave Trent Lott the benefit of the doubt about what was in his heart when he said something boneheaded in praise of the 100-year-old Strom Thurmond. It’s true that one word, “macaca,” which no one had ever heard of before (and may or may not have had racial connotations), was enough to sink Republican senator George Allen. And it’s true that countless honorable conservatives have been unjustly smeared as racists because they disapprove of affirmative action or oppose the teachers’ unions.

But let’s not get into this smarmy business.

Senator Reid used the word “Negro.” It’s out of date, but is it now offensive? Is it the new “N” word? Just a blink of an eye ago, “black” was the preferred locution. Jesse Jackson decided it should be “African American,” and the country went along. But the slower adopters (even your humble columnist, who prefers less orotund expressions) sometimes still say “black.” How long until that becomes a sin?

As for Obama’s being light-skinned, it’s certainly possible that his complexion made him more acceptable to some vestigial racists. For Reid to notice that is not to endorse it. And finally, the president’s lack of a “Negro dialect, unless he wants one,” was clearly an important asset. Most Americans expect their president to speak standard English. Black (there I go again) speech in America ranges from James Earl Jones to gangsta rap, and it was clearly an advantage that Barack Obama was articulate. When he chooses to adopt a black style, he does it a whole lot more authentically than Hillary Clinton managed in her embarrassing South Carolina appearance at a black (did it again) church. Remember “I ain’t noways tired”?

Republicans are right, so right, that if Mitch McConnell had said what Reid said, there would be a prolonged scandal. And they are right that political differences should not be turned radioactive by the malicious charge of racism. But it’s enough to point this out.